> Only that you've got a consistent, stable (and therefore, > formalizable) translation from your language to the machine. That's > all. Everything else is magic. Do you know that the Warren > Abstraction Engine used to power the predicate logic in Prolog into > machien code for a VonNeumann machine is so complex, no one has > understood it (or perhaps even verified it)?
Sorry, I mean the Warren Abstraction Machine (or WAM). I refer you to www.cvc.uab.es/shared/teach/a25002/wambook.pdf. Now, one can easily argue that I've gone too far to say "no one has understood it" (obviously), so it's very little tongue-in-cheek, but really, when one tries to pretend that one model of computation can be substituted for another (arguing *for* the Church-Turing thesis), they are getting into troubling territory (it is only a thesis, remember).... -- MarkJ Tacoma, Washington -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
