Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <aA4Ja.10576$bH3.2854@fe02.atl2.webusenet.com>,
Randy McLaughlin <randy@nospam.com> wrote:
 
> but all they did was name a couple of languages and stated the
> languages are broken into different gl classes, but no definition of
> what a language must contain to be a language.
 
Well, a "language" doesn't have to contain anything at all, really!
 
If you take a class in, or read a book about, formal languages,
you'll quickly see the definition that a "language" is a collection
of "sentences", usually represented as strings (which could be
strings of characters, or strings of bytes).  The language should
also have a set of rules, making it possible to uniquely determine
whether some string belongs to that language or not.
 
There are two particularly simple languages, which have great
theoretical but no practical value:
 
1. The "null" language --- it contains no strings at all !!!
 
2. The "empty" language --- it contains only one string: the empty string
 
Yes, these are different languages.....
 
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