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Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)
- Subject: Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)
- From: "Kelly Hall" <hall@priest.com>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 08:15:59 GMT
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2, rec.games.video.classic, comp.os.cpm
- Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com
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"Randy McLaughlin" <randy@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:tSRLa.1088$wG.325@fe04.atl2.webusenet.com...
> "computer programming languages (like C) must be able to express
> computation" I have never heard anything so silly, there is no definition
> that shows that.
I gave you that definition several days ago. You may have forgotten it.
Allow me to restate it.
A "computer programming language" is as follows:
- defined (formal) syntax
- defined (formal) semantics
- Turing-complete
After some reflection, I'm probably willing to loosen the Turing equivalence
to that of a finite state machine or push-down automata. But just because
those have weaker definitions of computation than Turing machines doesn't
mean that I'm willing to forego *all* computation and admit HTML and other
markup languages into what I think of as 'computer programming languages'.
I've used a few hardware description languages that aren't Turing-complete
but are pretty darned handy.
You can disagree if you like, but in my opinion if a language doesn't allow
one to express *some* kind of computation, then it's hardly a computer
programming language. That's why we call them computers, right? Because
they compute.
In a nutshell:
- if it can't compute, then it isn't a computer
- if it can't express computation, then is isn't a computer programming
language
Kelly