Christopher Smith wrote:
It's pretty hard for it to be impossible to implement a language in any
of what we call "turing complete" languages.
Nah.
Burroughs B series had typed assembly language. It was literally
impossible to express
union { int i; float f; };
I've worked with machines where ints are in different address spaces
than floats, so struct {int i; float f; } cannot be expressed.
I worked on one machine (a verifone credit card machine) where I
mentioned to someone something about using a pointer to a function, and
the response was as if I had grown a third head. Turns out I was wrong -
even tho it was programmed in something almost exactly like C, you
couldn't take the address of a function. Either something to do with the
memory hardware, or something to do with the instruction set only
allowing branches to literal addresses, prevented this.
Sure, you could write a C interpreter, but try fitting it in 14K.
Remember, "turing complete" assumes no I/O and unbounded memory.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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