What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Xah Lee]

hi Joe,

Joe Marshall wrote:
 « Expressiveness isn't necessarily a good thing.  For instance, in C,
you can express the addresses ...»

we gotta be careful here, because soon we gonna say binaries are the
most expressive. For instance, in assembly, you can express the
registers and stuff.

Expressiveness, with respect to — for lack of refined terms —
semantics, is a good thing, period. When discussing a language's
semantical expressiveness, it goes without saying that a “domain”
are understood, or needs to be defined. This is almost never mentioned
because it is very difficult. Put it in driveler's chant for better
understanding: we can't “compare apples with oranges”.

Let me give a example. Let's say i invented a language, where, there's
no addition of numbers, but phaserfy and realify with respective
operators ph and re. So, in my language, to do 1+2, you write “ph 1
re ph 2”, which means, to phaserfy 1, and phaserfy 2, then realify
their results, which results in 3. Now, this language is the most
expressive, because it can deal with concepts of phaserfy and realify
that no other lang can.

This may seem ridiculous, but is in fact a lot imperative languages do.
I won't go long here, but for instance, the addresses or references of
C and Perl is such. And in Java and few other OOP langs, there's
“iterator” and “enumerator” things, are likewise immaterial.

As to OOP's iterator and enumerator things, and the general perspective
of extraneous concepts in languages, i'll have to write a essay in
detail some other day.

----

Thanks for the summary.

Is there no one else who are able to read that paper?

  Xah
  xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

> Xah Lee wrote:
> > in March, i posted a essay "What is Expressiveness in a Computer
> > Language", archived at:
> > http://xahlee.org/perl-python/what_is_expresiveness.html
> > ...
> > On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages, by Matthias
> > Felleisen, 1990.

> > http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cobbe/pl-seminar-jr/notes/2003-sep-26/expressive-slides.pdf

Joe Marshall wrote:
> The gist of the paper is this:  Some computer languages seem to be
> `more expressive' than
> others.  But anything that can be computed in one Turing complete
> language can be computed in any other Turing complete language.
> Clearly the notion of
> expressiveness isn't concerned with ultimately computing the answer.
>
> Felleisen's paper puts forth a formal definition of expressiveness in
> terms of semantic
> equivilances of small, local constructs.  In his definition, wholescale
> program transformation is
> disallowed so you cannot appeal to Turing completeness to claim program
> equivalence.
>
> Expressiveness isn't necessarily a good thing.  For instance, in C, you
> can express the
> addresses of variables by using pointers.  You cannot express the same
> thing in Java, and
> most people consider this to be a good idea.