Comment by zarzavat
7 hours ago
Conditional expressions are declarative. For example, every template language worth its salt has conditionals.
A programming (i.e Turing complete) language requires recursion or a construct of equal power.
7 hours ago
Conditional expressions are declarative. For example, every template language worth its salt has conditionals.
A programming (i.e Turing complete) language requires recursion or a construct of equal power.
There is no recursive program that can't also be created by adding in more conditionals. It's turtles the whole way down.
You can emulate recursion with iteration and a push-down stack. If it doesn’t either recurse or offer both iterations (loops) and something that can act as a stack (at least an array or so) then it’s not Turing complete though. I have yet to see a stack or user-manipulable arrays in CSS.
You need unbounded recursion. Conditionals alone can’t do that. If you have some kind of conditional go to/jump if expression that’s a different matter.
You can't add all possible conditionals for every kind of loop/iteration, such as dynamic and infinite.