Turing Compliant?
William Tanksley
wtanksle at dolphin.openprojects.net
Wed Sep 1 18:55:57 EDT 1999
On 1 Sep 1999 21:14:35 GMT, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>Skip Montanaro <skip at mojam.com> wrote:
>> David> What the heck does Turing Compliant mean? I've heard discussion
>> David> that Python is not Turing Compliant. Is this true and why would
>> David> this be an important consideration for someone who is programming
>> David> in Python?
>> Actually, it's "Turing Complete". A Turing Complete language is one that
>> can compute anything that you can compute with a simple Turing machine. For
>> more info, search for "Turing Machine" at FOLDOC:
>> http://www.instantweb.com/~foldoc/contents.html
>And I don't know *where* they got the idea Python isn't Turing Complete;
>Python is *definitely* Turing Complete!
In the same sense that every other semi-useful programming language is.
Of course, Befunge and Brainf**k are both Turing complete -- which shows
just how useful Turing completeness is as a measure of programming
languages. (Yes, those asterisks are part of the language's name,
thankfully.)
>Even-MSDOS-batchfiles-are-turing-complete-ly yours,
You know, I'm not sure they are.
>Martijn
--
-William "Billy" Tanksley
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