Is this a true statement?
Rainer Deyke
root at rainerdeyke.com
Tue Jun 26 15:40:28 EDT 2001
"Tim Daneliuk" <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote in message
news:3B38D606.DA5886BE at tundraware.com...
> Rainer Deyke wrote:
> > Which part of the Turing machine can emmit light?
>
> None of them can - Including C++. You are begging a ridiculous
> point. To generate graphics there has to be the preceding computation
> and then the actual analog event. All T-C languages are equally
> able, in principle, to to the former. None can do the latter.
'None' is too strong a term. It's all a question of how the language is
defined. Almost all implementations of C++ can phsyically write to
arbitrary memory locations (although the standard does no guarantee this),
while Python cannot (without an exension module). If I take a Turing
machine and add an "emit light" opcode, it will still be Turing complete.
More interesting than physical actions are interactions with other programs.
A C++ program (in most implementations; not guaranteed by the standard) can
act as a device driver; a Python program cannot. This is a question of which
interfaces to the outside world a language exposes (directly or through its
standard library).
--
Rainer Deyke (root at rainerdeyke.com)
Shareware computer games - http://rainerdeyke.com
"In ihren Reihen zu stehen heisst unter Feinden zu kaempfen" - Abigor
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