In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 10/08/2006
at 07:50 PM, Paul Gilmartin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>What's a programming language?
A language that can be used to define programs.
>Must it have variables, assignment statements, loops, GOTOs, ...?
Not if it's a functional language. But it must have some sort of
iteration or recursion mechanism, and some sort of computation
mechanism.
>LISP
Has recursion.
>PostScript,
Postscript has more to do with FORTH than it does with troff.
>JCL is on the borderline.
No; it supports neither computation nor recursion.
>What does the "L" stand for?
The presence of the word language in the name suggests that it is a
language, but not that it is any particular type of language. What do
the J and C stand for?
>I suppose a harsh criterion might be the power to emlate a universal
>Turing machine, subject only to storage constraints.
No, that wouldn't be harsh. In fact, a useful programming language
would have to do more than that.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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