I am not talking about complexity but about calculating in calculations. You will never be able to write this in basic:
Line(8,+1→A,,*2)
In Basic, you'll have to write:
9→A
Line(8,A,A,A*2)

Psh, in BASIC you just do:
9
Line(8,Ans,Ans,Ans+Ans


As far as Language levels are concerned:

*Axe is as low as you get without BEING assembly. It barely has function support.
*C is one of the lowest level languages you will see on the computer. Most compilers even allow inlined assembly.
*C++ is stupid for this list. It's C with Java attached, and it shows.
*TI-Basic is interpreted. Badly. It also doesn't have enough features for me to give it a decent "Level", as it has no Object oriented anything, no functions, nothing a programmer would WANT in a High Level Language. However, it also abstracts ridiculously from the assembly it takes to run it.

Not that I don't agree with you on your points. The best part: These problems are perfect examples of where that horrible quote "You can't beat the compiler" is completely false. The compiler will NOT optimize anything like this, for the same reason Hayleia pointed out: It can't read your mind. It doesn't know if you want that 9 in Ans or not, so it has to assume the safer answer. An optimization that's not guaranteed to work is a bug, and people don't like bugs.

One idea I had, actually, sort of regarding to that specific type of problem: A program that goes through compiled code and determines where it CAN go. It follows through all branch instructions, tracing every line of code it runs, keeping track of which stored values are read from, and reports the results. This would also be useful for reverse-engineering binaries to identify data structures.

No offense, but I think some of you are not getting the point: the things I listed are harder to do in high level languages (not just less efficient), which is completely the opposite of the idea behind those languages - they're supposed to make things easier than if you were working in assembly.
You either need some hack like inline asm or compiler-specific intrinsics (that is still harder than it would have been, or at the very least not easier), or you can't even use either (C#? Java - to a point. at least it has some interesting stuff in the Integer class).

I would agree, but all the problems I named are easily solvable by just providing the relevant functions in the standard library. That doesn't make the language any harder to learn.

As far as Language levels are concerned:

*Axe is as low as you get without BEING assembly. It barely has function support.
*C is one of the lowest level languages you will see on the computer. Most compilers even allow inlined assembly.
*C++ is stupid for this list. It's C with Java attached, and it shows.
*TI-Basic is interpreted. Badly. It also doesn't have enough features for me to give it a decent "Level", as it has no Object oriented anything, no functions, nothing a programmer would WANT in a High Level Language. However, it also abstracts ridiculously from the assembly it takes to run it.

I agree with Axe and don't know the other languages
But that post is still interesting for me to know which language I am most likely to choose if I ever want to program for other things than calculators

Also I think to debate languages everyone should put their ASM fanboyism/elitism stuff away (or any other language for that matter). Because someone loves a programming language or is experienced with it doesn't mean that language is flawless/superior in every way possible nor that it's factually easier/harder to use.

Harsh

You know I never said that, right.

I like C#, I think it's a nice language with a clean syntax and I work with it much more than I work with assembly, it (and it's not alone in this) just has this problem that some things are made harder than they should be, even though it would have been trivial to fix many of the problems in a way that in no way compromises the language. And I gave specific examples of cases that are particularly vexing. No generalizations.

Quote from: harold on February 19, 2013, 10:03:28 am

I would agree, but all the problems I named are easily solvable by just providing the relevant functions in the standard library. That doesn't make the language any harder to learn.

I think jwalker's point is that assembly commands are just 2 characters long, followed with registers and/or digits and absolutely no english, making the language look like gibberish to anybody who's used to seeing languages like C, Java, TI-BASIC. Just this alone is enough to make the examples you specified harder to do in ASM for some people.

Also I think to debate languages everyone should put their ASM fanboyism/elitism stuff away (or any other language for that matter). Because someone loves a programming language or is experienced with it doesn't mean that language is flawless/superior in every way possible nor that it's factually easier/harder to use.

Exactly what I am saying. Also I think some of the reasons that those things aren't in the languages is, they are great on a low level basis, but how much do you actually need them in a high level language?

Exactly. I don't fully understand how you'd want high level languages improved. Full low-level access? Or implementations of everything you could do with those low-level things in the standard library? You'd still find missing things.

A bunch of the ones that are take the most effort to implement. Just because it won't be complete doesn't mean it can't be better.

You need that modular multiplication to implement Miller Rabin. Do you want to argue that C# is not well suited to testing whether a number is prime? It's not some scripting language.. you're supposed to be able to do real things with it.

But anyway none of this is really to the point. The point is, it's vexing.

Also, this is derailing completely.