Turing Compliant?

[William Tanksley]

On 1 Sep 1999 21:14:35 GMT, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>Skip Montanaro <skip at mojam.com> wrote:

>>     David> What the heck does Turing Compliant mean?  I've heard discussion
>>     David> that Python is not Turing Compliant.  Is this true and why would
>>     David> this be an important consideration for someone who is programming
>>     David> in Python?

>> Actually, it's "Turing Complete".  A Turing Complete language is one that
>> can compute anything that you can compute with a simple Turing machine.  For 
>> more info, search for "Turing Machine" at FOLDOC:

>>     http://www.instantweb.com/~foldoc/contents.html

>And I don't know *where* they got the idea Python isn't Turing Complete;
>Python is *definitely* Turing Complete!

In the same sense that every other semi-useful programming language is.

Of course, Befunge and Brainf**k are both Turing complete -- which shows
just how useful Turing completeness is as a measure of programming
languages.  (Yes, those asterisks are part of the language's name,
thankfully.)

>Even-MSDOS-batchfiles-are-turing-complete-ly yours,

You know, I'm not sure they are.

>Martijn

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley