Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>: > On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:48 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: >> According to your definition, there's no computer in the world that can >> work with integers or text files. > > Integers as far as RAM will allow, usually (which is the same caveat > as is used when describing a programming language as "Turing complete" > - strictly, that term is valid only if it has infinite memory > available), but yes, technically that's a subset of integers. However, > that subset is bounded by something other than the code, algorithms, > or even hardware - it's theoretically possible to add two numbers > larger than will fit in memory, by reading them in (even over the > network), adding segments, and writing them out again. > > Text files. Since there's already no such thing as a "text file" > unless you know what its encoding is, I don't see a problem with this.
Text files suffer from the same caveat as integers: there's a limit to how much you can store on the physical computer. A similar caveat prevents computers from dealing with real numbers. In the case of integers, you have a finite subset of ℵ₀. In the case of reals, you have a finite subset of ℵ₁. Yes, integers are algorithmically much more tractable than reals. However, in practice integer math is often computationally much harder than real math. Take cryptography vs calculus as an example. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
