John Carlson <[email protected]> writes: > If there truly is a universal language, is it a systems language? A logic > language can describe hardware. What about things like pointers? Have > they come up with self-referential logic? > On Apr 20, 2013 11:18 PM, "John Carlson" <[email protected]> wrote:
Self-referential logics are known as "impredicative"[1], but surely any Universal programming language is a Universal language? Having a Universal language only guarantees that we can represent every (computable) thing; it tells us nothing about how difficult it is to construct them[1]. Plus we can only ever construct models of things; no system can describe pointers completely (for example), since we can write Goedel sentences which involve pointers; a trivial example would be the halting problem for pointer-manipulating programs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impredicativity [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit Regards, Chris _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
