djones@decwrl.dec.com (Dave Jones) (09/19/90)
>From article <1990Sep14.181616.26890@dce.ie>, by ch@dce.ie (Charles Bryant): > In article <3972@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> vu0310@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu.cc.binghamton.edu (R. Kym Horsell) writes: >> ... You can't even >>say that "assembly language is closer to the machine & you can do things in >>it that you can't in HLLs" -- after all, assembly and HLL are both capable >>of emulating Turning machines, right? > > Well how would you translate this C function into Pascal. > > [ code omited. ] Obviously, you would run your C-to-Turing-machine translator over it, producing some Pascal initialization statements for your Turing machine emulator that you wrote in Pascal. What could be simpler? :-) Truth is, not only is it not the case that all computer systems are effectively Turing machines, none of them is! It's those damn finite tapes, for one thing. And computers are always hooked up to input/output devices. (A computer is something that controls and monitors machinery.) But discounting all that, don't we care just a little bit about how long it takes? -- Send compilers articles to compilers@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us {ima | spdcc | world}!esegue. Meta-mail to compilers-request@esegue.