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

["Randy McLaughlin" <randy@nospam.com>]

"Paul Schlyter" <pausch@saaf.se> wrote in message
news:bd4bce$epe$1@merope.saaf.se...
> In article <aA4Ja.10576$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.....
>
> -- 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul Schlyter,  Grev Turegatan 40,  SE-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
> e-mail:  pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
> WWW:     http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/
>          http://home.tiscali.se/pausch/

The point is not whether it is a language, but whether it is a programming
language.  As such it would require control of something.  Not all
programming languages contain strings at all, the one example is the Eniac
it had a language with no strings at all (other than the copper "strings"
(wires).  There were a number of computers and other digital processors that
had the sequence hard wired.  Please note that a sequence is required for a
program, but the sequence does not have to be strings.

There is a post that shows references that appear to show how to structure a
computer language to make it easier to apply for an ISO standard.  I don't
know how many languages have already been created that would fail to pass
muster today if they tried to get an ISO number assigned, nor do I know how
many qualified people would join committees to argue their points.