definition of a highlevel language?

[notnorwegian at yahoo.se]

On 26 Maj, 20:57, miller.pau... at gmail.com wrote:
> On May 26, 2:34 pm, notnorweg... at yahoo.se wrote:
>
> I wanted to address some other points I failed to mention in my first
> response.
>
> > so are they fundamentally differently built or is it just a lot of
> > lowlevel operations built on top of each other?
>
> Partly.  A high-level language is essentially one that gives you high-
> level operations, like "apply the function f to each element of the
> sequence seq, and return [f(seq[0]), f(seq[1]), ... f(seq[n])].
>
> But, it's more than that.  (You use Haskell as your example, but I'll
> use Python because I know it roughly a million percent better than
> Haskell... hehe.)  In Python, you have support from the language to
> treat functions as first-class objects; in C, you explicitly cannot do
> this -- to map an arbitrary function over a sequence, you're
> restricted to accessing the function through a pointer.  On the
> surface, it's the same operation, but that extra level of indirection
> can really bog one's mind down.  Think about how difficult it is for a
> human to interpret the declaration of a function pointer in C, for
> instance.
>
> > haskell is considered a very highlevellanguage but can you do
> > systemsprogramming with it(yes maybe it is very unpractical i dont
> > know but can you)?
> > is lambda calculus a more abstract and efficient way of modeling a
> > computer?
>
> Lambda calculus doesn't model computers.  It models *computation*.
> That is, given a Turing machine, there's a set of functions in the
> lambda calculus, which, when suitably combined, will yield the exact
> same result as the original Turing machine.  That doesn't in any way
> imply that Turing machines work by interpreting lambda calculus.
>
> > how did lispmachines work? was the basic system programmed in LISP?
>
> Yes, the whole kit and kaboodle, all the way down to the microcode was
> programmed in LISP.  In principle, there's no reason we couldn't have
> Haskell machines or Python machines.  It's just that nobody's been
> crazy enough to do it, that I know of. :-)


what is crazy about it?

in the same way programming webapps in C would be annoying because you
have to do a lot of lowlevel tasks it is dumb to program computer ina
highlevellanguage because you dont have direct access to lowlevel
tasks meaning you cant program it very efficiently, ie make it fast?