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

["Randy McLaughlin" <randy@nospam.com>]

"Kelly Hall" <hall@priest.com> wrote in message
news:ctLJa.554$R_7.50373791@newssvr15.news.prodigy.com...
<snip>
> The Turing machine is a handy way to express computation.  It's handy
> because it's easy to understand, easy to program to accomplish simple
tasks,
> and so far, sufficient to accomplish almost all tasks that people think of
> as 'computation'.  There's nothing magical about Turing machines, just
like
> there's nothing magical about the hunk of platinum used as the 'meter'
> reference - it's merely a known quantity.  If there's anything cool about
> it, it's that so far when researchers invent a new way to express
> computation, we generally find out that it's no more powerful than a
Turing
> machine.
>
> By requiring 'Turing completeness' in my definition, I'm requiring that
> anything that claims to be a 'computer programming language' express some
> minimum level of computation.  HTML and the other markup languages don't
> express *any* computation as far as I can tell.
>
> I'm not picky how you express computation: state transition functions for
> Turing machines are fine.  As are most CPU ISAs, virtual CPU ISAs, string
> rewriting systems, function invocation systems, whatever.  But you've got
to
> have computation, according to my definition.
>
> Kelly

That is my point you are using a test that determines whether a piece of
hardware is a computer to test to see if a language is a computer
programming language.  You are mixing apples and oranges.