After Parrot, what next?

Andrew Dalke dalke at acm.org
Sun Apr 15 12:20:45 EDT 2001


bas.vangils at home.nl asked:
>ehh, what does Turing-complete mean?

Turing-complete means the computer system can be used to
solve any computational problem solvable by a digital
computer.  When stated this way, the time needed to solve
the problem and the memory are not considered, and it
is assumed that a linear sequence of output is considered
sufficient.

In this context it means that TeX is a full programming
language with all the problems that entails (eg, it is
impossible to know in all cases if TeX will end.)  MathML
is not a full programming language so not as powerful but
there are statements you can make about it which aren't
possible with TeX.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org






More information about the Python-list mailing list