"Pure" in PL lingo means "no side effects". And from that pov there indeed are "perfect" languages as much as they can be "superior" to all others. Lambda calc

"Pure" in PL lingo means "no side effects". And from that pov there indeed are "perfect" languages as much as they can be "superior" to all others. Lambda calculus, for example, is perfect in the sense that it is the smallest, yet Turing-complete, pure language. You might of course start to argue about the evaluation strategy, but that's quickly done because there's only so much you can change ;). But that's the academic point of view, of course. In that view, every language needs to be defined completely on a few sheets of paper. If you can't do that, or have to use handwaving, you don't have a language, you have a piece of software that approximates a language.