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 <corentin.dupont@gmail.com> wrote:
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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