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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