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Comment by ThinkWriteMute | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with SASS is that it's turned into a full on programming language.

This is an odd meme, and not really accurate. Yes, Sass has a few control structures that are not meant to be used in day-to-day stylesheet coding. But the language is wholly geared towards creating stylesheets, and every feature was added with that in mind. It doesn't contain any programming features for the sake of having programming features.

Incidentally, it's also not Turing-complete.

I'm pretty sure it is Turning-Complete, and it's something they were heralding a few weeks back. Their goal is to be a programming language.

Wikipedia: After its initial versions, Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein have continued to extend Sass with SassScript, a Turing Complete scripting language used in Sass files.

and http://wiseheartdesign.com/articles/2010/01/18/the-demise-of...

You're replying to the guy who writes Sass. He's right. It's not actually turing complete, but it could be made so with a relatively minor change.

And I'm the guy who invented most of the programming facilities of Sass and I'll tell you, they're not very good programming tools -- but they're enough to make some really great stylesheets.

In order to be Turing-complete, Sass would have to have some way of reading and writing arbitrary amounts of memory. Since it has neither anonymous functions nor any sort of data structures, it can only read and write from pre-declared variables.

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