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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
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Organization: The Retarded Programmers Home, VU, Amsterdam
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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.