Python use growing or shrinking

[Gareth McCaughan]

Michael Hudson wrote:
>  Francois Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>  
> > [Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz]
> > 
> > > Do you have a link to a Turing-Complete language? I have here some
> > > text to process of infinite lentgh... <wink>
> > 
> > Here is a far less demanding exercise.  Merely print ackerman(4, 4):
>  
>  Apropos of not much at all, does anyone know if anyone has ever
>  constructed a language that only allows one to evaluate primitive
>  recursive functions?

Yes. Douglas Hofstadter, in "Goedel, Escher, Bach", describes
a language called BlooP, which has this property. Its only
iterating construct is a bounded loop, and it doesn't permit
recursion. (Specifically, a procedure may call only procedures
that have already been defined.)

Eric Raymond has an implementation of BlooP in his "Retrocomputing
Museum", at http://catb.org/~esr/retro/ .

-- 
Gareth McCaughan  Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com
.sig under construc