Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2024 09:45:55 -0400
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <vaklaj$30hk4$1@dont-email.me>
References: <vab101$3er$1@reader1.panix.com>
 <vad7ns$1g27b$1@raubtier-asyl.eternal-september.org>
 <vad8lr$1fv5u$1@dont-email.me> <vafmiv$202ef$1@dont-email.me>
 <20240825201124.000017a3@yahoo.com> <86msl05ctt.fsf@linuxsc.com>
 <20240826105456.0000150a@yahoo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Injection-Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2024 15:45:56 +0200 (CEST)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="bc6a81b98d459148848596e6a19de7f4";
	logging-data="3163780"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18Ka1epTios1bmNvhcTletQ5nwLrPXcKuk="
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Cancel-Lock: sha1:fj/GflM3yXLYkRj0YzGJRUfTKsI=
In-Reply-To: <20240826105456.0000150a@yahoo.com>
Content-Language: en-US
Bytes: 3192

On 8/26/24 03:54, Michael S wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Aug 2024 17:48:14 -0700
> Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:
....
>> It's been amusing reading a discussion of which languages are or are
>> not high level, without anyone offering a definition of what the
>> term means. Wikipedia says, roughly, that a high-level language is
>> one that doesn't provide machine-level access (and IMO that is a
>> reasonable characterization). 
>
> I don't like this definition. IMHO, what language does have is at least
> as important as what it does not have for the purpose of estimating its
> level.

That's not a particularly useful response. It would have been more
useful to identify what features a language should have to qualify as
low level or high level.
Defining a level solely in terms of what the language has, without
regard to what it doesn't have, leads to a potential ambiguity: what if
a language, let's call it A/C, which has every feature that you think
should qualify it as a low level language, AND every feature that you
think should qualify it as a high level language? If you define those
terms solely in terms of what the language has, then A/C must be called
both a low-level language and an high-level language.
If, on the other hand, you define the level of a language both in terms
of what it has, and what it doesn't have, A/C would be unclassifiable,
which I think is a more appropriate way of describing it. Every time
that someone says "low level languages can't ...", that statement will
be false about A/C, and similarly for "high level languages can't ...".

One principle that should be kept in mind when you're defining a term
whose definition is currently unclear, is to decide what statements you
want to make about things described by that term. In many cases, the
truth of those statements should be a logical consequence of the
definition you use.