Autocoding project proposal.

[Christopher Browne]

David Masterson <dmaster at synopsys.com> writes:
> Wow!  I barely hit return to send my message...!
>>>>>> Courageous  writes:
>> It depends on perspective. Expressive power for _what_? 

> Yeah.  I was hoping I could slip this by.  It wasn't really germaine
> to the point of getting new people to be attracted to a new
> language.

> Unlike human languages, computer languages are often designed with
> specific purposes in mind.  General purpose languages (assembler, C,
> Lisp, etc.) might be said to have "equal expressive power" in the
> sense they could each be applied to the same type of applications.

> I should've said C instead of SQL...

SQL seems a useful example, as a language that offers considerable
convenience for describing some things, but which is deficient when
trying to describe other things.

It is typical for people _NOT_ to describe their applications in terms
of SQL; they generally embed some little bits of SQL into programs
written in other languages.

For instance, if you're trying to do something to a tree of associated
items, you may need to embed a snippet of SQL that reads a few nodes
of the tree inside a larger program in another language.  

This has some drawbacks; the processing of each SQL query has a cost,
so that if you submit a whole bunch of them, that tends to be rather
less satisfactory than submitting one query that would do all the work
in one fell set-processing swoop.

On the other hand, there are database systems that are tightly tied to
one language or another, and that tends to be much less satisfactory
than the "substrate-neutrality" of SQL.

All by itself, this seems to debunk the notion that there ought to be
One True Language.

Furthermore, the sorts of things you would want to use SQL to do don't
appear to fit with what we've seen so far of "VIC," which adds some
cracks to the argument that it's a "universal" thing...
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