I don't want to sound pedantic, but the very fact that a thing such as perly.y exists actually proves that Perl is a CFL. Tools such as YACC, Bison and the like are used to create parsers for context free languages. This means that Perl's grammar defines a CFL.

The fact that something depends on what's next to it doesn't imply that it is context sensitive in the Chomsky hierarchy, it all depends on how one can write the grammar.

In general you don't want a programming language to be context sensitive since parsers for CSLs are much less efficient than those for CFLs.

Don't get me wrong, both Perl and Pascal (as well as about any programming language you can think of) are Turing ocmplete, i.e. one can compute any computable problem in each of those languages (if the Church-Turing thesis holds).

Hope this helps, -gjb-

Update: Notice I was talking about grammer, semantics is specified in some programming language, and hence is specified recursively enumerable.

In reply to Re: Re: original definition vs final language by gjb
in thread original definition vs final language by dystrophy

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