Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 4 Oct 2024 07:40:54 GMT, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 06:56:38 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

But C = “machine language” under the hood. That’s what Python uses.

 
It's turtles, turtles, turtles all the way down...

One thing we learned in Comp Sci was the concept of “abstract machines”.
There is no fundamental difference between hardware and software:
“hardware” is just what you start with when you turn the power on, but
does that include “firmware” and “microcode”?

A lot of what we do in programming/scripting is building one layer of
“abstract machine” on top of another, until we get to something optimized
for solving our particular problem.

Of course, all this goes out the window once you get to the GUI layer;
that is the end of the line, with no more programmability (easily)
possible on top of that. From that point on, the human user has to do all
the work.