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Subject: Re: Languages don't  matter.  A mathematical refutation
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2015 12:58:56 -0700
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> SQL is low level in my view, because it does not support basic programming
> abstractions, e.g. abstract data types.

Is Lisp also low level in your view then?

>> http://prog21.dadgum.com/166.html claims that C's highest
>> level feature is the switch statement,
> I don't buy the idea of closeness to the hardware. It would mean that the
> language level would depend on the target machine. E.g. Lisp would be high
> on x86 and low on a Lisp-machine.

It's not about closeness to the hardware, it's about algorithms.
Searching for a value by iterating through a list of them might use
different instructions on x86 vs Lisp machine, but it's the same
algorithm on both.  But doing a binary search on the list is a different
algorithm.  And would you consider C's switch statement to be
declarative rather than imperative?  It could generate a linear search
or a binary search depending on what it decides will be faster code.
But most of us think of C as imprative.

>> [paper proposing that HLL's are those with garbage collection.]
>> Native support for any feature is not automatically high level. You could
> have assembler with linear algebra matrix operations. It would be still
> assembler.

GC is not like matrix operations.  It's not a library that you call.  It
pervades the operation of your entire program.

There's no universal definition of an HLL and I thought the GC
suggestion was interesting, though I'm not fully bought into it at the
moment.