I'd say they are *never* interchangeable. Whenever you want to have a computation task accomplished, you need to, in the end, get those electrons shuffled around the silicon in the right way. Every computational task has an inherent level of complexity that you can't reduce below. This complexity has to manifest itself somewhere between your source code that encodes the computation the way you expressed it, and the electrons being shuffled. You can push the complexity between the layers (your source code, libraries, language runtime, OS, hardware) but it has to be somewhere.
This is also a very theoretical minimum. In practice, our today's implementations of computational systems are still far above their minimal level of complexity - when we discover simplifications, we're incrementally (and likely, asymptotically) approaching the minimum. (This morning's philosophical thought brought to you by a guy sitting home with flu, unable to do anything much more meaningful.) Attila. -- http://twitter.com/szegedi On 2010.09.06., at 5:10, vruz wrote: > I guess a distinction must be drawn between a simple language and a > simple implementation of a language. > > They're many times not interchangeable. > > :-) > > On 6 September 2010 05:08, Randall R Schulz <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Sunday September 5 2010, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> I am starting work on implementing the Go like language for the JVM >>> and was wondering if there is a simple toy language implementation >>> for the JVM that I could look at. Is anyone aware of such an >>> implementation? >> >> Clojure might qualify as a relatively simple language from the >> perspective of code generation. >> >> >>> I am looking to implement a hand-coded lexer/parser for the language. >> >> Why? >> >> >>> Thanks and Regards >>> Dibyendu >> >> >> Randall Schulz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en.
