enhance convenience rather than contribute to the fundamental power of the language

Computer Science An Overview _J. Glenn Brookshear _11th Edition

Universal Programming Languages

In  Chapter  6  we  studied  a  variety  of  features  found  in  high-level  programming
languages. In this section we apply our knowledge of computability to determine
which of these features are actually necessary. We will find that most features in
today’s high-level languages merely enhance convenience rather than contribute
to the fundamental power of the language.

Our approach is to describe a simple imperative programming language that
is  rich  enough  to  allow  us  to  express  programs  for  computing  all  the  Turing-
computable functions (and thus all the computable functions). Hence, if a future
programmer finds that a problem cannot be solved using this language, the rea-
son  will  not  be  a  fault  of  the  language.  Instead,  it  will  be  that  there  is  no  algo-
rithm  for  solving  the  problem.  A  programming  language  with  this  property  is
called a universal programming language.