What are some pieces of code that exemplify the power/functionality/style of their language of implementation?

Question

I don't mean to say that any turing-complete programming language can be less powerful than another in terms of computation, but using "terseness" instead would not fufill the entire meaning of my question. Power in my mind is a combination of terseness and clarity.

Answer 1

this is something I have done last week using boost phoenix and boost thread. This is actual C++ standard compliant code mixing functional programming with everything else.

    threads(8)
        ( let(T2 = Matrix(N,N), T3 = Matrix(N,N), E_ = double(0))
          [ parallel.for_(i,j).in(no,no)
            [
             phoenix::bind(&Matrix::resize, T2, N, N, false),
             phoenix::bind(&FType::get, F, to_pointer(T2), start, stop),
             E_ -= energy(transform(C1,C3,T2,T3),
                          -(eo(i)+eo(j)), ev, ev)
              ],
             parallel.critical[ref(E) += E_] ] );

Answer 2

Peter Norvig's "How to Write a Spelling Corrector" is an example of how Python can do something seemingly complicated with relatively little code.

Answer 3

Why Perl is brilliant for quick and dirty text filtering jobs:

perl -pne 's/\bpax\b/Demi-God Emperor of the Universe/g'

The ability to run an arbitrary command (or commands) for each line of the input file is quite nice. Sure you can do the same thing with a shell script or pipeline but I think this one-liner aspect of Perl is probably its most useful feature¹.

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^{1Others, especially those who know more about Perl than I, may disagree :-)}

Answer 4

The read-eval-print loop of Lisp. A small, interactive, clever implementation of a language in itself, and almost 50 years old to boot.