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

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

"Kelly Hall" <hall@priest.com> wrote in message
news:l%1Ia.120$RK2.11917426@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com...
<snip>
>
> > Java, HTML, etc are barely 'coding' at all - they are more like a
> technical
> > specification of a program than the program code itself - the result
being
> > that the computer has to do far more work at runtime to sucessfully
> execute
> > the program.
>
> HTML doesn't describe computation - it's a markup language for web pages;
> what exactly did you mean?  JavaScript?  ASP?

HTML is programming, just as CP/M's sub files, dos bat files , IBM's old
JCL, Unix script files, etc.

There are plenty of every day tasks that are programs.  A program is a
defined "automatic" task.

I would not call CP/M's submit an efficient language it can not do graphics
(as well as many other things).  Not every programming language contains
every feature (graphic, array processing, etc.), but that does not mean that
you can not program in it.

>
> Java isn't much different than C when it comes to expressing computation.
> In neither case can I say something like:
>   given an array a[0..i]
>   return a[0..i] such that for all j=0..i-1, a[j] <= a[j+1]
> and have the compiler magically cough up a sort routine.  Are you thinking
> about functional languages like Haskell and SML?  I've seen quicksort as a
> one-liner in Haskell.
>
> Kelly