oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) (03/22/91)
Archive-name: languages/theory/expressiveness/1991-03-21 Archive: titan.rice.edu:/public/expressiveness.dvi [128.42.1.30] Original-posting-by: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) Original-subject: A Reference. [Re: Expressiveness] Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN) In article <924@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes: >One thing I would _not_ include in a definition of "expressive" is the >ability to control the machine at a low level. Expressiveness should >describe a language's suitability for "expressing" the solution to a >large class of problems without regard to performance ... I agree. A much more formal view of what some people still think as a religious topic may be found on Matthias Felleisen's "On The Expressive Power of Programming Languages", original of which appeared in the Proceedings of the European Symposium on Programming 1990, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 432, 134-151. A revised version of this paper is ftp-able from titan.rice.edu as public/expressiveness.dvi. Abstract: The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims on the relative expressive power of programming languages, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences. As a first step in this direction, we develop a formal notion of expressiveness and investigate its properties. To validate the theory, we analyse some widely held beliefs about the expressive power of several extensions of functional languages. Based on these results, we believe that our system correctly captures many of the informal ideas on expressiveness, and that it constitutes a good basis for further research in this direction. ... oz --- In seeking the unattainable, simplicity | Internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca only gets in the way. -- Alan J. Perlis | Uucp: utai/utzoo!yunexus!oz