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0 pointsmatt_kantor4y ago0 comments

I guess in my head "expressiveness" is some fuzzy combination of what you are able to do plus how easy it is to do those things. I'd consider a calculator that supports real numbers to be more expressive than one which only supports integers, all else being equal.

Maybe this definition is idiosyncratic, though. It's certainly not objective.

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ImprobableTruth4y ago

I'd agree that "what you are able to do" seems like it's intuitively part of expressiveness, but due to Turing completeness you don't have any situation where language A can compute something that language B can't. So the only difference in capabilities seems to be in how easy it is to compute something, rather than if one is able to do something.

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