Re^3: wondering the development of perl

Personally I'd feel fairly happy saying, for example, that Lisp and Perl had more features than Java and C

Oh, absolutely. You'd be crazy to deny, for example, that Python has more features than FORTRAN. There are certainly languages that have more features than others. But would you be happy pointing at one language and saying that it had more features that all other languages? I don't think it can be done in any meaningful way. That's the point I was trying to make.

--
<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

Comment on Re^3: wondering the development of perl

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Re^4: wondering the development of perl by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jun 05, 2006 at 13:40 UTC
But would you be happy pointing at one language and saying that it had more features that all other languages? Common Lisp maybe :-)	[reply]
Re^4: wondering the development of perl by Fletch (Bishop) on Jun 05, 2006 at 14:46 UTC
I think (and preface most of the rest of this with these two words) the problem is using the word "features"; underneath it all you're just twiddling your infinitely long paper tape, so in that sense no language is more feature-full than any other. The difference you're trying to highlight is the difference in the abstractions that the language provides that push whatever grunt work/complexity/minutia further out of the programmer's ken and in doing so make their job simpler, and those can be qualitatively compared between languages.	[reply]