On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 9:29 PM, <sa...@eng.it> wrote: > Zenaan Harkness writes: > >> So thank you Joel for spending the time to describe these > > concepts as 'pedantically' as you have. Your descriptions > > are an excellent grounding for the conversation which is > > undoubtedly going to continue :) > > One question. Can you give me an example of Turing completeness with > just declarations? > > If not, the description you refer to may be valid only when discussing > "configuration", and even there there is some loss. > > [Scripts, in the Unix world - and GNU is a Unix replacement - are > something almost Turing complete or Turing complete, depending on the > language used for the a given script]
You know, I don't think I've seen very many configuration scripts, even those using the richer aspects of bash, perl, python, et. al., which have made use of Turing completeness. (And I do not think you intend to mean that the configuration scripts themselves might sometimes be Turing complete.) That's really beside the point. You don't have to have a Turing complete scripting language for it to contain constructs that have to be interpreted by reference to the grammar rather than the symbols' names. And, conversely, adding identifiers to attempt to cover every necessary possible configuration is always going to result in a boatload of arcane terms with arcane semantics. (And you still have the issue of engineering clairvoyance versus allowing sysads to wire together custom one-off configurations.) You can't force simplification. Or do you have something else in mind? -- Joel Rees Computer storage is just fancy paper. The CPU is just a fancy pen. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAAr43iOBsuKUOxZO776NZXBJHTMuPkn6xnt-f=uxwfbmdqi...@mail.gmail.com
