What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

Ketil Malde ketil+news at ii.uib.no
Tue Jun 20 11:34:21 EDT 2006


"Rob Thorpe" <robert.thorpe at antenova.com> writes:

> But it only gaurantees this because the variables themselves have a
> type, the values themselves do not. 

I think statements like this are confusing, because there are
different interpretations of what a "value" is.  I would say that the
integer '4' is a value, and that it has type Integer (for instance).
This value is different from 4 the Int16, or 4 the double-precision
floating point number.  From this viewpoint, all values in statically
typed languages have types, but I think you use 'value' to denote the
representation of a datum in memory, which is a different thing.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants



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