> Just being Turing-complete doesn't get you to the ability to run something like Word. In fact it does. That's the whole point of turing-completeness. It is a

> Just being Turing-complete doesn't get you to the ability to run something like Word. In fact it does. That's the whole point of turing-completeness. It is actually possible to create output with sed that results in executable bytecode similar to C. You would need a sed to bytecode compiler. You could even write this compiler in sed (once you have something else that can compile sed). Why? Because sed is turing complete. Yes, it's very unpractical to do so, but you could do it even on current hardware. > I'd also note that because physical computers have finite storage, you could by the same logic implement Word in a finite-state machine. actually you can't. Word itself is turing complete, i.e. you can theoretically program with Word. So no you can't implement word with a finite-state machine, because it can't reflect the theoretically infinite states an arbitrary input program can create. You need a turing machine for that. > So you can write Word in ls in the same way you can write it in sed. No. That's missing the point of sed being turing complete.