What is Expresiveness in a Computer Language?

From: Xah Lee (xah_at_xahlee.org)
Date: 07/10/05

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    Date: 10 Jul 2005 02:57:04 -0700

    What is Expresiveness in a Computer Language

    20050207, Xah Lee.

    In languages human or computer, there's a notion of expressiveness.

    English for example, is very expressive in manifestation, witness all
    the poetry and implications and allusions and connotations and
    dictions. There are a myriad ways to say one thing, fuzzy and warm and
    all. But when we look at what things it can say, its power of
    expression with respect to meaning, or its efficiency or precision, we
    find natural languages incapable.

    These can be seen thru several means. A sure way is thru logic,
    linguistics, and or what's called Philosophy of Languages. One can also
    glean directly the incapacity and inadequacy of natural languages by
    studying the artificial language lojban, where one realizes, not only
    are natural languages incapable in precision and lacking in efficiency,
    but simply a huge number of things are near impossible to express thru
    them.

    One thing commonly misunderstood in computing industry is the notion of
    expressiveness. If a language has a vocabulary of (smile, laugh, grin,
    giggle, chuckle, guffaw, cackle), then that language will not be as
    expressive, as a language with just (severe, slight, laugh, cry). The
    former is "expressive" in terms of nuance, where the latter is
    expressive with respect to meaning.

    Similarly, in computer languages, expressiveness is significant with
    respect to semantics, not syntactical variation.

    These two contrasting ideas can be easily seen thru Perl versus Python
    languages, and as one specific example of their text pattern matching
    capabilities.

    Perl is a language of syntactical variegations. Python on the other
    hand, does not even allow changes in code's indentation, but its
    efficiency and power in expression, with respect to semantics,
    showcases Perl's poverty in specification.

    http://xahlee.org/perl-python/what_is_expresiveness.html

    © Copyright 2005 by Xah Lee.

     Xah
     xah@xahlee.org
    ∑ http://xahlee.org/

  • Next message: Ari Lukumies: "Re: How to check for already running program?"

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