[OT] On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages

[Paul Backus]

On Sunday, 15 November 2020 at 06:36:16 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 01:55:49AM +0000, Paul Backus via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>> Expressive compared to what? I think pretty much everyone 
>> would agree that Rust is more expressive than, say, Brainfuck, 
>> but some would probably argue that it is less expressive than 
>> Lisp.
> [...]
>
> By what are you measuring expressiveness here?  Mathematically 
> speaking, BF has the same expressiveness as Lisp, and Lisp has 
> the same expressiveness as D: they are all Turing-complete.  I 
> have not seen a *mathematical* definition of expressiveness 
> that would measure these languages differently.

Then you haven't watched the talk. :)