> You could argue that it's just syntactic sugar, but it's bloody important syntactic sugar. Yes, of course you could, since everything beyond, uh, paper tape,

> You could argue that it's just syntactic sugar, but it's bloody important syntactic sugar. Yes, of course you could, since everything beyond, uh, paper tape, next-state table, and current pen-position (or whatever other pieces there are in a theoretical Turing machine) is basically syntactic sugar. Or, IOW, all programming languages higher than assembly are nothing but syntactic sugar. I like syntactic sugar. (But OTOH, I'm a diabetic. Gotta watch out for that sugar.)