Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: arc <arc.deletet...@vorsicht-bissig.de>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:16:55 +1300
Local: Tues, Nov 13 2012 4:16 am
Subject: Re: lisp style question
"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com> writes:
> arc <arc.deletet...@vorsicht-bissig.de> writes:
Where could I find this?
>>> Expressive power. Power of being usable to write practical programs.
>> And does this have a mathematical definition? It sounds like it's got a
> Yes, it also have a mathematical, information theoric definition.
>>>> Anyway, the point was the language Rivka described is inadequate to
But it is saying much to point out that it *isn't* Turing Complete? Good,
>>>> serve as a general-purpose programming language. Even if you expect a >>>> lisp to be 'more powerful' than a Turing machine in some sense, you >>>> still expect it to be at least as powerful as a Turing machine. >>> Which is not saying much!
>> It's not saying much to say a language is not turing complete? (*laughs*)
> No, it is not saying much to say that a language IS Turing Complete.
because that's what I was doing :-P > There's no point in mentionning that a language is Turing Complete,
What Turing complete tells you is that the language can encode any
> because Turing Machines are Turing Complete, and are utterly inusable > for any practical purpose. computable function (and normally it comes with a caveat, sometimes implicit, within the limits of the space available. I'm sure you know this and are just prentending you don't to vex me). So we've got two dimensions to describe programming languages, power and
(OK, so they're not really entirely independent: a less powerful
By saying there's no point in saying that a language is turing-complete,
Sometimes also it's a surprise that a language is turing complete,
Also, discovering that the lambda calculus, recursive functions, and
So just because there are turing-complete languages that aren't useful
( Do you take this attitude to everything in life? There's no point in
> And even for theorical purpose, you're probably better off sticking with
Is this all just because you hate the term 'turing complete'? Well,
> Lambda Calculus. I'll try to remember to call it 'lambda calculus complete' if I think you might be reading, but 'Turing complete' is the commonly-accepted term for what I was trying to describe. --
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