(ichimunki) Re: Real Languages vs. Perl

[ichimunki]

That sentence looks like a typo more than anything. Maybe a better use of natural language will help Mr. Swaine be more exact.

There is only one programming language. It looks like this when you try to represent it with symbols 11010110101011101000101010000100100010110.

I consider that painful to write and maintain, especially when you consider that cell phones have more RAM in them than the first home computers. Thankfully, so did a lot of other people, who invented various systems to write stuff down, then wrote programs to interpret that stuff into an appropriate set of 1s and 0s.

Every command-line command, every GUI point-and-click, every script, and every compiled C program has to be turned into that stuff before the computer is going to do anything with it.

The interesting question isn't what does Perl lack that makes it less full (although a hardcore compiler would nice, Perl favors a recursive view of the language which means that any free-standing compiled Perl script has to include or link to a full perl executable).

The interesting question is when does something stop being a program?