Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge

[Thiemo Seufer <ica2_ts@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de>]

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.

> 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.


Thiemo