[plug] Community Seminars

[Cameron Patrick]

Bernd Felsche wrote:
| HTML is *never* a programme.

Even with embedded Javascript?

| Nor are TeX and Docbook, strictly speaking.

I'm pretty sure that XSL (which Docbook is written in) is
Turing-complete.  TeX is most certainly a full-blown programming
language in its own right with the usual set of variables, functions,
if statements, recursion and so on.  Likewise Postscript is a
complete programming language.

Just because they're usually used to generated printed documents and
have only limited I/O capabilities doesn't mean that they're not
programming languages.

| A program is something that the system executes "directly"; data
| are what programs use.

So in other words, if something is interpreted, then it's data; if
it's compiled it's a programme?  That sounds like an over-simplification 
to me :-/  It seems to imply that, say, a Python script is data if it's
executed by an interpreter but a programme if there's a JIT compiler
involved?  That strikes me as rather bizarre.

Cameron.