On Mon, Dec 28, 2015, 8:35 PM Tristan Strange <tristan.strange_at_gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 27 December 2015 at 17:00, David Barbour <dmbarbour_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > Excel is not what I'd consider powerful.
> You and I have very different ideas what a spectrum of computational power
> is.
>
> Excel is a turing complete
Turing completeness is almost always an irrelevant spectrum of power for PL
discussions. Even Brainfuck and Conway's Game of Life are Turing complete.
A more relevant formal spectrum is described in Mattias Felleisen's "On the
Expressive Power of Programming Languages."
> If I was using a fluffier definition of power and talk about
> its side-effect generating power
Effects can be modeled many ways.
A rather interesting approach, especially for live coding, is to model all
effects in terms of software agents observing and manipulating a purely
functional codebase. This is something I'm trying.
Side effects are a particularly ornery approach to expressing effects. It
hinders testing, reasoning, modeling of non-conventional effects like
backtracking. I'm certainly not conflating power with side effects.
--
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Received on Tue Dec 29 2015 - 07:01:07 GMT