Comment by Dylan16807
6 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?
if we trim a regex down to literal character matches is it still a regex?
So any text file is a programming language?
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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