Is this a true statement?

[David C. Ullrich]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 12:47:23 -0400 (EDT), "Steven D. Majewski"
<sdm7g at Virginia.EDU> wrote:

>
>
>On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, David Lees wrote:
>
>> Not necessarily.  It might go faster if you were comparing a Python
>> built-in operation (coded in C) with something inefficiently coded in
>> C++.  But the statement that "Python can do everything C++" is true, but
>> a tautology. You can substitute nearly any language; Basic, C, Algol,
>> Lisp,... and it is still a true statement.
>> 
>> david lees
>> 
>> 
>> MDK wrote:
>> > 
>> > Python can do everything C++ can do but just slower.
>
>Wrong, David. 
>Turing completeness means that anything you can *COMPUTE* in one
>language you can computer in another. Python, Lisp, C++, etc.
>are all equivalent in that sense. 
>
>But you can't *DO* all of the same things in all languages -- for
>example: you can write a device driver in a language if you can't
>specify interrupt vectors or hardware address pointers. 

??? I thought a device driver was just a file, hence a finite
sequence of bytes. You can certainly use Python to write an
arbitrary sequence of bytes to a file. No doubt it's much easier
in C++ (or rather in typical implementations of C++?) to decide
_what_ sequence of bytes to write to that file, but if we're
talking about what's literally possible and impossible I don't
see how writing a device driver can be impossible in Python.

Could well be that your distinction between what you can do
and what you can compute makes sense, but I don't see how
_writing_ a device driver is anything but "computation"
(given the appropriate documentation.) Maybe I'm missing
something.

>-- Steve Majewski
>
>
>



David C. Ullrich
*********************
"Sometimes you can have access violations all the 
time and the program still works." (Michael Caracena, 
comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc 5/1/01)