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Re: Pushing the limits [useless]
From: |
Jeff Kingston |
Subject: |
Re: Pushing the limits [useless] |
Date: |
Thu, 01 Nov 2001 08:19:47 +1100 |
On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 09:37:58 +0100, Samuel Lacas wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I was recently re-reading the Lout documentation, and the following
> sentence (2.3 in Design document) made me smile:
>
> A programming language may be considered complete when it attains the
> power of a Turing machine, but no such criterion seems relevant to
> document formatting.
>
I believe my intention in writing this sentence was not so much to
comment on the Turing-completeness or otherwise of Lout, but rather
to point to the difficulty of evaluating the satisfactoriness of a
document formatting system, by comparison with a programming language.
My views have modified a bit since then, as I have watched the evolution
of the Eiffel language. It reached Turing-completeness at the start,
and yet it has evolved steadily ever since; and its type system is
still a mystery. So now I think that programming languages and document
formatting systems are not as different in that way as I once did. Lout
struggles to offer features relevant to modelling documents; object-oriented
languages struggle to offer features relevant to modelling objects. It's
pretty much the same struggle.
Jeff