Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> Humberto Massa wrote:
>> @ 26/04/2004 17:54 : wrote Thiemo Seufer :
>>
>> >Program: Software which is intended for execution on an actually
>> >existing interpreter.
>> >
>> >Data: Software which is not ~.
>> >
>> >
>> >Thiemo
>> >
>>
>> You are a real bad boy :-) So, I will give some food for the brain:
>>
>> Mozilla actually gets a PNG, SVG, from the Web and executes the
>> instructions there (put some pixel of this color here, draw a line from
>> point A to point B).
>>
>> "$ cat file.txt" gets a text file and executes the ASCII/UTF/LATIN/etc
>> words there as instructions "send letter A to the terminal", "send
>> letter S to the terminal", "send letter S to the terminal", send letter
>> H", and so on.
>
> Both examples are wrong. Neither PNG/SVG/... nor text describe a
> turing-complete language for the given interpreter, so it's not
> possible to program arbitrary algorithms with them.
Who said you had to be able to? 'lex' isn't a Turing-complete language
either (it codes significantly less powerful automata). Does that mean
that the input file for 'lex' is not a program?
>> Every data is *interpreted* in some by some piece of the software you
>> run. Even if it's only to display it in some form you can recognize.
>> This e-mail text, p.ex., is being transformed from text (UTF?) to font
>> glyphs, to drawings in the screen in front of me by a combination of
>> Mozilla and Windows 98 software. Every single char in it is
>> *interpreted* so it can be drawn on the screen.
>
> Not every interpretation is an execution.
Yeah, but now we get into the impossible problem of determining what is and
what isn't. Unless you want to exclude perl scripts too.
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Reply to: