From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,9df2768f19ef857b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newscon06.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.net!newsmst01b.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.com!postmaster.news.prodigy.com!newssvr12.news.prodigy.com.POSTED!4988f22a!not-for-mail From: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <1137903774.826703.118170@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1137978607.032607.315500@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: Question on Ada Expressive Power X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1437 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1441 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.134.81.81 X-Complaints-To: abuse@prodigy.net X-Trace: newssvr12.news.prodigy.com 1138021875 ST000 70.134.81.81 (Mon, 23 Jan 2006 08:11:15 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 08:11:15 EST Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com X-UserInfo1: FKPO@MONTBWQR]TX\ZIBNFXBWR\HPCTL@XT^OBPLAH[\RYIBK^RAQFW[ML\THRCKV^GGZKJMGV^^_JSCFFUA_QXFGVSCYRPILH]TRVKC^LSN@DX_HCAFX__@J\DAJBVMY\ZWZCZLPA^MVH_P@\\EOMW\YSXHG__IJQY_@M[A[[AXQ_XDSTAR]\PG]NVAQUVM Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:11:15 GMT Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2588 Date: 2006-01-23T13:11:15+00:00 List-Id: "Gene" wrote in message news:1137978607.032607.315500@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > > Haiku is expressively powerful, but one doesn't use it for general > purpose communication... > I wrote about this in an article for Crosstalk a few years ago. Others have discussed it, I think, but I don't have other references. There is a difference between expressiveness and expressibility. We can typically express the solution to any programming problem in any programming language. Some languages are directly expressive of certain kinds of problems. Others can be splicktled into service for expressing those same problems. For a long time, COBOL was horrible at expressing mathematical functions such as Square root, but we could laboriously write long obscure routines of our own to do that function. C++ has a handy little compound assignment statement that is quite expressive, but we can get the same effect, though with longer statements, using almost any other language. Perl is expressive of regular expressions, but we have a regular expressions package in Ada that helps. Expressiveness, in computer programming, is the ease with which a given language allows us to map the problem space to the solution space. It has nothing to do with the number of lines of executable code are created. Expressibility means that, regardless of how expressive a language might be, we can always find a way, albeit a difficult way, to finally solve the problem. As to the Haiku example, in software we are concerned with reducing ambiguity through expressiveness. In poetry (seem William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity") we place value on ambiguity. In art, we want to allow for variations of interpretation. Such variations are not so highly valued in engineering - including software engineering. Richard Riehle