Re: bitwise comparators

[Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

I think that it was Douglas Hofstadter to invented FLOOP, the minimal language
in one can write a program to do anything that can be programmed in any other
computer language (of course Turing got there first, but FLOOP is more
accessible).  It's a really simple language.  And it takes a lot of work to do
anything.  But by some measures of power, one can't be any more powerful.
OTOH, subroutine libraries, structured programming, type checking, etc. make the
actual creation of the program much easier.  On this measure Ada95 does well,
though most versions lack such features as built-in garbage collection,
color-codeing IDE's that also help one with screen painting, and other advanced
features.  The core of Ada95 is designed to help one catch errors at compile
time, and this is a great good, and, in itself, a "powerful" feature.  It lacks
other powerful features that would make it a workable RAD environment.  Much of
this can be fixed by further development, but there may be some limitations to a
statically bound language.  However, just because a dynamically bound language
had different limitations doesn't mean that they are better limitations.  It
depends on what you need.