4 ms·
Forth has a minimal set of primitives as well, and an even simpler parser (it's literally "read until next space" and "search a linked list to see if this match
by Vendan 10y ago
Forth has a minimal set of primitives as well, and an even simpler parser (it's literally "read until next space" and "search a linked list to see if this matches an existing word, otherwise, is this a number?, otherwise, yell")
- kazinator 10y agoAnd, likewise, the Turing completeness of those primitives doesn't mean what some naive new computer scientists think it means. Turing completeness doesn't mean that those primitives constitute a language which can be extended to become any language; it means that for any given Turing machine, those primitives can be used to write a program which computes the same thing as that Turing machine. That program might be, for instance, a small state machine dispatcher accompanied by a big table with some initial contents. VirtualBox can run an entire PC, and that PC can run an OS, under which we have a C++ compiler. That doesn't mean VirtualBox has been extended to be a C++ language implementation.