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000003_icon-group-sender_Thu Aug 15 13:14:54 2002.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id g7FKEc607370
for icon-group-addresses; Thu, 15 Aug 2002 13:14:38 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200208152014.g7FKEc607370@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>
X-Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: Re: What about "Expressions?" (was Re: Icon Wish List)
Date: 15 Aug 2002 16:53:13 GMT
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To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
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Status: RO
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Hrvoje Blazevic <hrvoje@despammed.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 02:16:33 +0200, Christopher Browne wrote:
>
>> This is indeed an interesting question.
>>
>> It _may_ be that the notion of "expression-based" being referenced is
>> that control structures work on the expression in a bit of a different
>> way than in Algol-descended languages.
>>
>> But it's not clear.
>>
>> Terse is definitely a "hype-heavy, theory-light" language; in the
>> absence of more documentation, it's not obvious what it's doing that is
>> similar to Icon that _isn't_ similar to C or Modula-3.
>>
>> And I think the likelihood of Icon "launching" because of being regarded
>> as a "more low level language" as being, um, rather remote. Terse hasn't
>> been taking the world by storm any more than FORTH has.
>>
>> But I'd be curious as to what the definition of "Expressions" is
>> supposed to be, in this context.
> I must be careful here, lest someone from this group answers; " If
> you can't speak English", how can you understand what an expression
> is".
You're exactly right, and I'd certainly not "mark you down" for not
being a native speaker of English. (I don't think I know how to
pronounce _your_ first name, so I have my own "issues of illiteracy"
:-).)
> Anyway, I'm not very interested in theoretical definition of what an
> expression means. The reaction was just to the statement that: The
> only other computer language that I know of which uses expressions
> is Terse (www.terse.com) an expression-based assembly language.
I think theory _is_ important here; it's from theory that we can get
some common concepts that allow us to agree on just what it is that
the word "expressions" means.
> Now, I don't know terse (never heard of it), but I do know that
> Scheme is an expression based language. Everything (except
> definition) is an expression - even assignment is.
OK...
> I guess that the important difference here is that most imperative
> languages (except Icon) work with statements. Scheme and the rest of
> FP languages work with expressions.
>
> To quote an example from Graphics Programming in Icon; p9
>
> In Pascal, the following line is a statement:
>
> if switch = on then write("on") else write("off");
>
> Icon is different in this regard. Icon has no statements, only expressions.
> ...
> write(if switch = on then "on" else "off")
>
> end quote.
>
> Well, the same is true for Scheme (or Lisp, and other FP languages
> in general)
I'm just not sure I'm seeing what is the essential difference between
"statements" and "expressions" here.
I'm not a dumb reader; your English seems fine (better than far too
many natives!); I'm _quite_ familiar with Lisp and Scheme; I'm just
not sure what the difference you're getting at is. And perhaps what
you have in mind isn't the same as what the guy that brought up Terse
had in mind...
--
(concatenate 'string "chris" "@cbbrowne.com")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/languages.html
Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?