Re: Languages don't matter. A mathematical refutation

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> I would say that is a domain-specific language. Remoteness from the machine
> code does necessarily imply higher level. To me SQL or OpenGL are lower
> level than C, though both are farther away from the machine and closer to
> some domains. I think being higher level is related to the abstraction
> capabilities.

I thought of low level = programmer chooses the algorithms, high level =
computer chooses them.  So SQL is very high level (programmer writes a
select or join and the database figures out the query plan, and in some
cases the db might notice repeated queries and decide to add indexes all
by itself).  http://prog21.dadgum.com/166.html claims that C's highest
level feature is the switch statement, since it analyzes the set of
cases and might generate a linear sequence of comparisons, a jump table,
or a tree-like search.  The other C statements mostly generate
straightforward sequences of machine instructions modulo things like
register allocation.

I saw another paper proposing that the dividing line between low and
high level languages is that the high level ones have garbage
collection.  So that would mean Ada is low level while Java is high
level.  Java (not C) is probably Ada's main competition for big new
projects these days, and GC is probably Java's main attraction over Ada.