I ran out of monikers for blog entries number6.cpp

I never had the chance to interact with something similar to the SIF when I took the Programming Language Course last semester. That’s a shame because it seems like a very interesting work tool that enables better comprehension about the way in which one may go about creating a new language or to better understand the basic mechanisms of the functional and imperative programming paradigm. What I also find interesting is how we can skip all the complexity of trying to create a new or feature from a low-level language like assembly or a really verbose one like C and just concentrate on what is really important, like data, semantic and syntax.

Another important aspect of the SIF, at least for me, is how it is based on such a simple pattern like Adapter and how powerful it can be. Even with an OO-Pattern and using and OO-Language we can create a something very similar to Lisp or functional languages in general. This makes me think about the theory of computability as proposed by the Church-Turing Thesis. Copeland (2017) describes any computable method with this hypothesis as one that can be done by a human with sufficient time, no intuition and only using and pencil and paper. This method must also be programmable in a Turing Machine, in the sense that the machine must approach the desired result using only instructions available on a Turing Machine. Since practically all computers in this day and age are Turing Machines with different implementations, we can represent any algorithm using any of those implementations. Meaning, we can compute pretty much everything using any kind of paradigm and represent anything starting from a particular paradigm and “translate” it to another.

I hope that when I work in the near future, I may be able to experiment with the tricks and interesting factors of many languages, maybe even help in creating one myself.

References:

Copeland, J. (2017). The Church-Turing Thesis. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Recovered on 11/03/2019 from:  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/