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That sounds extremely underwhelming to my mind. Like having a programming language sold as free of any awful metaprogramming constructions (and induced headach
by psychoslave 3y ago
That sounds extremely underwhelming to my mind.
Like having a programming language sold as free of any awful metaprogramming constructions (and induced headaches) through guarantees that no metaprogramming at all can be done in it.
A language that forbids to talk about its own grammatical structures is doomed to see its users abandon or extend it when they will inevitably deal with a situation where exchanging about the communication tool at hand is required to appropriately deal with its possibilities, expectable behaviors and limits.
- epgui 3y agoYour comment doesn't make any sense. Also: > A language that forbids to talk about its own grammatical structures That's just not the case, and it's not what is being claimed here.
- psychoslave 3y agoI’m not acquainted with NF, but to my perspective what the comment I was replying to was suggesting is that the structures can’t express anything about a structure of the same level of comprehension. Which, to my mind, implies that an expression should not be allowed to embed an expression. Which is roughly equivalent to disallow a code to embed code written in the same language, let alone a code aware of the language structure and able manipulate the current code base abstract syntax tree or any equivalent facility. Once again, I don’t claim this about NF, which I wasn’t aware of before this thread. I never dug into Quine’s work to be transparent on the matter.