DooMeeR wrote:

>>What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing a fork to a spoon?
> 
>  From Church's thesis, one can easily answer this question: they are
> equivalent.
> 
> The reduction is quite easy. A fork can be reduced to a spoon using a
> fire, an anvil and a hammer, and a spoon can be reduced to a fork using
> a saw.

So, why at all bother with OCaml if it's equivalent to Basic anyway, or
machine language, for that matter?

Church's Thesis is often cited for precisely this purpose of cutting off
discussions related to differing aspects of programming languages --
sometimes this may even seem a Pawlowian reflex reaction. However,
I think Church is a red herring here, as the important aspects of
programming languages are not at the language:machine interface, but
at the human:language interface. The design of a milk carton certainly
does not matter a lot for how well it manages to store milk -- pretty
much all of them do that quite well. But it certainly does matter for
the question whether I'll spill milk all over the table when I try to
put some into my tea (as I did this morning).

-- 
best regards,
Thomas Fischbacher
t.fischbacher@soton.ac.uk