Came across this while researching Turing's proof that a turing machine can compute anything that is computable†. It's Church, comparing his and Turing's approa

Came across this while researching Turing's proof that a turing machine can compute anything that is computable†. It's Church, comparing his and Turing's approaches: > computability by a Turing machine ... has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately. (1937a: 43.) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/ If we see imperative languages (e.g. Java) as descending from Turing machines, and functional languages (e.g. Lisp) as descending from Church's lambda-definability, the same observation seems to apply. It's not that Turing's approach is better, just easier to "get". † "computable" meaning "can be computed" (not "computable with a turing machine"). Turing doesn't prove this formally - it's an intuitive appeal, and no exceptions have been found. See section 9, page 249 (page 20 of the pdf) https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.cs.virginia.ed...