Re: Is Python higher level than Ada?

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

Victor Porton <porton@narod.ru> writes:
> My question is not about particular features, but about which features
> are considered in definition of "higher level".

I don't know that "higher level" is a well-defined term.  I think of it
as meaning the language abstracts away more machine-level details for
you, letting you think of the problem more naturally.  

Python has native datatypes for lists, dictionaries, arbitrary-precision
integers, etc., and it has automatic memory management.  It generally
takes much less Python code than Ada code to implement similar
functionality (though the Python version will run orders of magnitude
more slowly).  So in this sense, I'd say Python is higher level than
Ada.  

To support this notion of "high level", here's an essay on why the
switch statement is C's highest-level feature, because it can choose
among a range of algorithms depending on the inputs:

   http://prog21.dadgum.com/166.html

There's a highly theoretical paper by M. Felleisen about the expressive
power of programming languages (one could think "more expressive" =
"higher level"):

   http://ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/scp91-felleisen.ps.gz

I've looked at it but don't understand it.