Re: OT: Power in programming languages.

All that you've said doesn't contradict what I said. They're designed
for different domains and can do different things, yes, but that was
exactly my point: the language with the ability to do the most things
(ie the most powerful) is assembly or writing directly in machine code,
since you can with enough time write a program to do anything it's
possible to make a computer do. But is a program in assembly language
the most succinct? For most things you can probably write a shorter
program in a higher level language (which typically are specialised in
some way or limited in their use compared to assembly) that is shorter
than the equivalent written in assembly language. Thus power is not the
same as succinctness in the case of computer languages. Which part of
that argument do you disagree with? All I was basically saying was if
you take a higher level language like perl, you can do a lot of things
more succinctly than in a lower level language like C or assembly, but
you tend to have more power at the lower level because the attempts of
higher level languages to hide the machine from you also places
constrainsts typically on what you can do.
 I know that different languages are designed for different purposes.
Did I say they weren't? I don't think that contradicts the basic thrust
of my argument. Succinctness is not related to power. Power is about
what you're able to do with something, not how easy it is to do it. I
was simply putting it in terms of computer languages since that was the
basis of the argument I was disagreeing with.