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Can we also prove that awk is Turing complete this way?

• pkrumins 14y ago
  That's not the point. Many people are surprised when they hear that sed is Turing complete. How come a text filtering program is Turing complete they ask? Turns out sed is like a small assembly language that has a comparison operation, a branching operation and a temporary buffer. If you translate a problem into a textual representation then these operations are enough to make sed Turing complete!
  • yzhengyu 14y ago
    Shrug Even more people are surprised that Excel is Turing complete.
    • wladimir 14y ago
      That's not entirely a fair comparison as Excel contains a complete VB environment.
• mturmon 14y ago
  awk has while loops, conditionals, variables, and associative arrays. It's Turing-complete.