I think Agustin Gonzalez-Tuchmann wrote: > I think we, humans, think in an imperative way. We humans like to > express our thoughts in an imperative way. But the paradox is that, > IMO, we humans like to see other's thoughts in a declarative way! If > this holds any water, then I would say that a declarative language > is a great way to express the meaning of a computer program when we > want to communicate that meaning to humans and we hope the target > audience can manipulate that meaning (i.e. declarative > programs). However, an imperative one is a better tool for a human > to put together that meaning.
Interesting analysis! > Because Lisp and Jess offer variables and assignment, they're > really pretty much equivalent in capability and expressiveness >to C > and Java. > Turing complete functional languages are as expressive as an > imperative language. The issue is not expressive power but it is an > issue of fit of use to the particular domain. I didn't mean to suggest that functional languages lacked expressiveness, but simply that in general Lisp, C, and Java are more alike than different; they are more similar to each other than any of them are similar to a true functional language. If something is hard to express in one of [Java | C | Lisp ] it's generally hard to express in all of them -- except for symbolic computation, which Lisp excels at mostly just because symbols are first class objects in that language. --------------------------------------------------------- Ernest Friedman-Hill Distributed Systems Research Phone: (925) 294-2154 Sandia National Labs FAX: (925) 294-2234 PO Box 969, MS 9012 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Livermore, CA 94550 http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov -------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [EMAIL PROTECTED]' in the BODY of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], NOT to the list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
