[prance]

> Haskell is actually less expressive. It is a functional abstraction on top of what is essentially a procedural machine and with all abstractions placed on top of lower layers you can only lose functionality as you go up rather than gain. You could say assembly language is the most expressive language out there.

That is not what is usually meant by "expressiveness" of a language. You seem to be talking about types of languages (as in the Chomsky hierarchy), by implying that there are problems you can solve in assembler but not in Haskell. That is not the case, as both are Turing-complete (Type-0).

In contrast, "expressiveness" usually refers to the "ease" (one may substitute conciseness in most cases) with which higher level concepts (abstractions) are expressible in the language, and here Haskell clearly wins against assembler, and many other popular languages.

[crimsonalucard]

The set of all possible assembly instructions is bigger than the set of all possible assembly instructions that haskell can compile to. Therefore haskell is less expressive than assembly language. That is what I mean by expressive.

[prance]

>The set of all possible assembly instructions is bigger than the set of all possible assembly instructions that haskell can compile to.

No it's not. The Haskell compiler is free to use whatever assembly instructions that it sees fit to compile the Haskell program.

Maybe you mean that effectively, the set of assembly programs (i.e. sequences of assembly instructions) which existing Haskell compilers happen to produce is limited. This is true. But it is also true that you can find an equivalent Haskell program for every possible assembly program, where equivalent means they exhibit the same behavior with respect to inputs and outputs. This is because both are Turing equivalent.

Now, it's also true that the way two equivalent programs get to their results may differ. For example, the assembly program might be faster. However, these are non-functional properties of the programs. And you were talking explicitly about functionality, so this point doesn't count towards your argument.

[crimsonalucard]

My mistake, I shouldn't have used the word "functionality" so I concede. And yes, I meant sets of assembly instructions, thanks for the correction.

But this is the basic idea I was trying to convey: that you lose "expressiveness" as you get higher and higher in levels of abstraction.

[asdfasdf]

you are mistaking the meaning of expressiveness I'll provide a short example in assembler vs haskell expressive power. I'll use hello world as an example. This is considers an amd64 compatible processor, because I have to know the names of the registers.

```asm section .data str: db 'Hello world!', 0Ah str_len: equ $ - str

section .text global _start

_start: mov eax, 4 mov ebx, 1 mov ecx, str mov edx, str_len int 80h mov eax, 1 mov ebx, 0 int 80h ```

In Haskell I don't have to consider any processor.

```hs main = putStr "Hello World" ```

expressiveness is about how much code you need for a certain behavior. It's not about how many (possible fucked up) source files my compiler accepts.