Comment by Dylan16807

7 days ago

If we trim markdown to just italic, bold, and underline, is it still a programming language?

What if we trim even further, to just the ASCII control codes? My newline characters make the computer perform a special action to generate formatted output. Is that programming?

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Dylan16807

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zem  7 days ago

if we trim a regex down to literal character matches is it still a regex?

  • imtringued  7 days ago

    So any text file is a programming language?

    • andrewaylett  6 days ago

      I would say that a "language" is a necessary component of a "programming language".

      An empty file was an IOCCC winner: https://www.ioccc.org/1994/smr/ but you need to interpret that empty file as C source in order to reasonably claim to have programmed the computer.

      My reasoning comes more from the other direction: someone who writes HTML is programming therefore HTML is a programming language.

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