It is possible by ingenuity and at the expense of clarity... {to do almost
anything in any language}. However, the fact that it is possible to push
a pea up a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is a sensible
way of getting it there. Each of these techniques of language extension
should be used in its proper place.
-- Christopher Strachey
Related:
Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional
tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily
to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus
extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of
view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including
Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l
summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly
funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
Turing tar-pit n.
1. A place where anything is possible but
nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the
foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and
languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of
operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations
they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ
only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly
designed computers....
Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but
nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the
foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and
languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of
operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations
they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ
only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly
designed computers....
