Re: a language is a language

Pascal Bourguignon wrote:

Simon Richard Clarkstone <s.r.clarkstone@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
And Epigram is clearly a programming language even though it is not
Turing-complete (it forbids general recursion, so all programs must
terminate).

Not for me :-) No Turing completeness, no programming language.
Call it a calculette if you will, not an ordinateur.

I do not know Epigram, is it a interpreted language with the feature of
writing and sourcing files? If so, recursion can be faked, which I have
done many years ago with the description language of POVRay, a raytracer.
It was not Turing complete at that time (I think, it is now - have not
looked at it for some time), but I had a betting, if it is possible to
create recursive trees with that language. I managed to fake it with
defining some pseudo recursion, translate that to nested iterations, write
it a source to file, and source that file into the interpreter, voila...

So if Epigram is interpreted with the possibility of sourcing self created
files, then you have recursion. ;-)

Regards
Stephan

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