Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Sam Gillett wrote:

>Randy McLaughlin wrote ...
>
>>How many people believe their cars would be a good way to carry hogs to
>>market?  That is why we have specialized automobiles today.  When Turing
>>postulated his engine he had no conception of what we would use computers
>>for today.  The fact that there is no "Turing-complete" law is the genius
>>of flexability.  In the 40's the only reason for computers was to calculate
>>(even if the calculations were to help break cyphers).  Computer
>>progrogramming languages are tools used to program computers.  Yesterdays
>>languages were designed to calculate, to limit todays tools limits how well
>>and how efficiently a computer can be used today.  As far as I can see
>>using computer for what they were originally used for will continue
>>forever, does that mean that we should stop using computers for anything
>>else?
>
>That brings up an interesting thought.  The Turing machine was designed to
>break German ciphers.  Should anything that is Turing complete be able to
>break ciphers?

Umm, wrong Turing machine.  ;-)  You are thinking of the Bombe
machines used for cracking the Enigma codes.

The Turing Machine of computational mathematics is a conceptual
symbol processing system.  It's not a good engineering solution for
_any_ computational problem (except being a Turing Machine  ;-),
including cryptanalysis.

-michael

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