I'm no compiler writer but as a layperson I'd guess for that you'd at least
need a program that could determine if two constructs are equivalent, the
Haskell and Python list comprehension example from 2 emails ago. The only
way I can think to do that is to parse some source in language X and see if
the AST generated is the same as language Y.
As far as something fully automated my intuition tells me that you'd need a
single program that could act as a compiler and/or interpreter for all the
languages you're trying to test. This is the only way, for example, to
automatically determine that variable scoping works the same in Javascript
and Scheme.
-deech
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Dupont Corentin
Hello, reading this thread a question came to me: Is there a way of automatically deriving programming languages ascendancy?
Like biologist can determine the distance between two genotypes, and determine a hierarchy between species from that.
Are you aware of researchs made in the field?
On the net I found interesting graphs but no comments on the methodology. http://www.levenez.com/lang/ http://rigaux.org/language-study/diagram.html
Cheers, Corentin
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