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timA blog comment in response to an argument that writing a parser for Perl is Turing-complete:
"That's some mighty fine left brain thinking there( especially for a Monday morning ), but does it in anyway affect any practical aspect of Perl? Like can it be used to show that Perl is more or less reliable/secure? This isn't a criticism of your node, but I left college 35 years ago, and this sort of analysis seems very ivory-tower-ish to me now. It's sort of like saying 'one cannot prove self-existence'. Is the fact that Perl cannot parse itself a good or bad thing, or can other languages do it? Does that make them superior?"
Computer science is an intellectual and pragmatic failure. Kids, if you're looking for a good career, major in English.
"That's some mighty fine left brain thinking there( especially for a Monday morning ), but does it in anyway affect any practical aspect of Perl? Like can it be used to show that Perl is more or less reliable/secure? This isn't a criticism of your node, but I left college 35 years ago, and this sort of analysis seems very ivory-tower-ish to me now. It's sort of like saying 'one cannot prove self-existence'. Is the fact that Perl cannot parse itself a good or bad thing, or can other languages do it? Does that make them superior?"
Computer science is an intellectual and pragmatic failure. Kids, if you're looking for a good career, major in English.
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Date: 2009-08-13 10:01 pm (UTC)Their proof is pretty silly. Perl has metaprogramming/module-initialization hooks; those hooks can create or modify type signatures; type signatures affect parsing. Now, "type signatures affect parsing" is an unfortunate design decision, but that's not what really* makes parsing Perl Turing-complete --- no, it's the metaprogramming. I mean, Lisp/Scheme compilation is also Turing-complete.