What do you mean by the expressiveness of a programming language?

Question

I see a lot of the word \'expressiveness\' when people want to stress one language is better than the other. But I don\'t see exactly what they mean by it.

• Is it

Answer 1

I always took it to be roughly equivalent to how high-level a language is. If you wanted to try to quantify expressiveness, the units would be something like "machine code instructions per language statement"

A more expressive language might be very good at doing rather a lot of work without writing a lot of code. However, it would probably be more domain-specific and a wee bit slower for some tasks than a less expressive one.