Re: [Caml-list] what is high-level (was: Wikipedia)

[David Teller <David.Teller@ens-lyon.org>]

Le vendredi 04 novembre 2005 à 09:13 -0600, Brian Hurt a écrit :

> >From that link:
> > Although it is a high-level language, C is much closer to assembly 
> > language than are most other high-level languages.
> 
> In other words, all languages are high-level, some are just more 
> high-level than others.

Fair enough on that. Still, we might need to define a notion of
higher-level language. Perhaps a language A is of higher-level than a
language B if the mode of thought imposed/encouraged by A are less
related to actual technical issues of language implementation and more
to issues of the target domain of your program ?

> Learning a new paradigm is hard.  As someone who has done it three times 
> now (moving from the sphagetti code of Basic to the procedural style of 
> Pascal, then moving to Object Oriented, and most recently Functional), 
> trust me on this.  Learning a new paradigm makes learning a new language 
> 10 times as hard AT LEAST as learning a new language in the old paradigm.

Same here, plus logical programming somewhere along the way.

Still, in OCaml/Haskell/ML, you do need some understanding of the type
system, which is typically not necessary in other programming languages.

> Brian

Cheers,
 David
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