It isn't *essential. *Technically, I believe I/O can be added to a computer programme as some sort of initial settings (for any given run of the programme). Obviously this isn't much use in practice, of course! But from a philosophical perspective it's possible, so it isn't ontologically essential to the function of computation.
A trivial example would be my son's Python programme to generate 2000 digits of pi. It just uses some existing equation which generates each digit in sequence. It happens to write the output to the screen, but if he took out the relevant PRINT statement, it wouldn't - but it would still compute the result. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
