Yes, I would think a programming language should do the following: 1. accept various forms of input and from various types of devices 2. move data, compare data and have logical comparisons 3. output data in various forms to various types of devices. Scott Ford z/OS consultant
"Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 10/08/2006 at 07:50 PM, Paul Gilmartin said: >What's a programming language? A language that can be used to define programs. >Must it have variables, assignment statements, loops, GOTOs, ...? Not if it's a functional language. But it must have some sort of iteration or recursion mechanism, and some sort of computation mechanism. >LISP Has recursion. >PostScript, Postscript has more to do with FORTH than it does with troff. >JCL is on the borderline. No; it supports neither computation nor recursion. >What does the "L" stand for? The presence of the word language in the name suggests that it is a language, but not that it is any particular type of language. What do the J and C stand for? >I suppose a harsh criterion might be the power to emlate a universal >Turing machine, subject only to storage constraints. No, that wouldn't be harsh. In fact, a useful programming language would have to do more than that. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT ISO position; see We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
