Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC830713); site vu44.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!teddy!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!mcvax!vu44!jack From: jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: High-levelity Message-ID: <563@vu44.UUCP> Date: Thu, 10-Jan-85 15:51:21 EST Article-I.D.: vu44.563 Posted: Thu Jan 10 15:51:21 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jan-85 07:36:04 EST References: <1242@bbncca.ARPA> <2377@umcp-cs.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: The Retarded Programmers Home, VU, Amsterdam Lines: 39 Well, let me air a few more thoughts on high-level{ity,ness}: - A few people said that assembler is higher in level than machine code. I think that this is *not* true. Though macro-assemblers and such things may be higher-level than non-macro-assemblers, I think that bare assembly is just as low-level as machine code. For instance, if you compare an 8080 to a 6809, everyone (I hope) agrees that 6809 machine code is higher level than 8080 machine code. Now, it would be ridiculous to make 8080 assembler higher in level than 6809 machine code (I, for one, would rather write 6809 machine code than 8080 assembler, but this might very well be caused by a serious brain-disease :-). - Someone (sorry, I forgot who) said that one language is more HL than another if it lets you say *what* is to be done, while the you have to specify *how* it should be done in the other. This sounds as a really neat criterion. It is also more-or-less measured by my previously posted "statistic approach" (have a number of programmers tackle the same problem, and see how many come up with the same solution). - - There are some parial orderings that seem to be quit general accepted ( F66 < F77, Algol 60 < Pascal, etc), and there are some pairs of languages that are probably not comparable (C and LISP, APL and COBOL, etc). But, there are also some languages that are in the same class, like Pascal, C, Algol 68, Ada, or SNOBOL, AWK, ML/1 (maybe). Maybe we could try ordering these *within their class* by having people defend their pet-language by showing it's strength over the other languages in the same class? If enough people do this, we should be able to make a list of pros and cons of each language, and use this to order the languages within one class. -- Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack or ...!vu44!htsa!jack If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.