
There's a possibly-interesting thread running on the W3C TAG mailing list [2] about the "Principle of Least Power" [1], in which Haskell gets a mention. The debate gets kind-of interesting around discussion of analyzability of language expressions vs expressibility, with passing reference to Turing completeness. Intuitively, I've felt that expressions in a pure functional language are easier to analyze than expressions in (say) C or Java, despite them all being fully Turing complete (so no difference in expressive power there). Can it truly be said that it's easier to analyze a functional expression than a C program? What could that actually mean? I feel the discussion is (so far) missing a trick, but I'm not sure what it is. #g -- [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Dec/0101.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Dec/0113.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Dec/0115.html (etc.) [2] http://web3.w3.org/2001/tag/ http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/ -- Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact