Is Python programming language?

[Dan Stromberg]

Sent from my android phone.
On Feb 9, 2013 6:41 PM, "Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> On 2/9/2013 6:53 PM, Michael Torrie wrote:
>>
>> On 02/09/2013 04:26 PM, Tim Roberts wrote:
>>>
>>> Most people would call bash a "scripting language", but it is also
clearly
>>> a programming language.  It has syntax, variables and expressions.  I
>>> suspect it is Turing-complete, although I haven't seen a proof of that.
>>>
>>> I would assert that scripting languages are a proper subset of
programming
>>> languages, not a separate category.
>>
>>
>> I'm pretty sure Bash is turing complete.  I know it's been shown that
>> sed is turing complete, and awk probably is too!  If I recall, the way
>> to show a language is turing complete is to implement a turing machine
>
>
> If the language has arrays, conditional execution, and explicit (while)
loops or recursion, you can be pretty sure it is Turing complete. I presume
this covers awk and bash. Something like the game of Life, where the
looping in implicit in the operation, is much harder to show Turing
complete. I suspect sed is non-trivial also.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

For proving something Turing-complete, you only need to prove equivalence
to some other Turing-complete language.

The simplest test involves three things:
1. Sequential flow
2. An if, while or recursive function/method call
3. An arbitrary number of variables - arrays are optional

Strictly speaking, no language on a real computer is fully Turing-complete,
because real computers don't have an infinitely large memory, while TM's do.

But it's common to handwaive past that part of the definition.

> Terry Jan Reedy
>
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
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