Re: [MUD-Dev] Properties of computer languages

["Travis S. Casey" <efindel#io,com>]

On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Cynbe ru Taren wrote:

> In general, a conditional of some sort, and recursion, are the
> practical minimal set you're thinking of.  Look at the languague which
> Scheme compiles down to after all macro expansion is done on something
> like the Guy Steele's Rabbit compiler, and you'll see more or less
> this.

Quite a few programming languages have managed without recursion, though,
by having iteration constructs -- e.g., Fortran and several BASICs.
Recursion can be fairly hard to implement, so depending on what you want
to use the language for, it might be easier to just have a GOTO statement
and/or a couple of specific iterators.  (You can implement any sort of
iteration with GOTO, after all -- although if your programs are going to
be more than a page or two, they may get very hard to read.)

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