Turing completeness deals with computability, not with the practicalities of IO and so on. To say that something is Turing complete simply means that you could

Turing completeness deals with computability, not with the practicalities of IO and so on. To say that something is Turing complete simply means that you could implement a universal Turing machine, which can then run any other Turing machine as its program, and so can compute anything that is in theory (without any constraints on time and space) computable. I understand the authors aggravation with people throwing around the sentence 'x is Turing complete, so you can do anything in x' without any appreciation of the disconnect between the theoretical and the practical sides of this, but I think that it's use is more in jest than serious and that the author should possibly grow a sense of humor. Typical use: A: can you do 'x' in Perl B: Perl is Turing complete, of course you can do 'x'. Shows that person 'B' has a sense of humor and/or wants to get rid of the questioner without having to answer the question, not that they're clueless about the practicalities of this statement. It's analogous to 'google it', 'rtfm' or any one of another 100 ways in which people try to show their superiority over others or try to create an 'in' and and 'out' group. Think of it as just another meme and move on. Flagged.