What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Marshall]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>
> On a semantic level, the tag is always there - it's the type (and
> definitely part of an axiomatic definition of the language).
> Tag elimination is "just" an optimization.

I see what you're saying, but the distinction is a bit fine for me.
If the language has no possible mechanism to observe the
it-was-only-eliminated-as-an-optimization tag, in what sense
is it "always there?" E.g. The 'C' programming language.


Marshall