On Thu, 7 Sep 2017 06:05 pm, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Steven D'Aprano > <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> Thank you for the explanation Stefan, but I do know how to use a browser. >> >> What I didn't know is how the HTML works. I thought it was actually doing >> some computation, but it seems like its just jumping to pre-rendered tic- >> tac-toe grids. > > That's all HTML is capable of. Without assistance, HTML is nothing > more than layouts.
That's what I thought, but then Stefan introduced this as if it were a refutation: "Whenever someone yells at me, »HTML is not a programming language!«, I show them the interactive tic-tac-toe by Flo Kreidler, written in pure HTML" but it turns out it isn't a refutation, its just a simple trick. [...] >> But anyway... it doesn't seem to me that the page is doing any >> computation using HTML. It's more like a book listing a table of primes. >> The book hasn't done any computation, and we wouldn't say that this is >> proof that pieces of paper are capable of programming. > > Correct; however, with something this small, the difference isn't > significant. What, ultimately, is the difference between a > live-rendered image and a static photo? A lot. That's why it took significantly more than a century of technological development to go from the first static photos to systems able to render photo-realistic images. And we still can't do that rendering in real-time, except for the simplest, least realistic images. (The oldest surviving permanent photographic image dates back to 1827 or so.) As a practical technique, naturally using a lookup table of pre-computed values is a good solution to many problems. But you cannot say you are performing general computation if *all* you do is a lookup. > For the ability to brag that a > fully-playable game requires nothing more than HTML, I think this > minor cheat is worth it. It's gimmicky and cute, rather than being any > sort of "hey look, HTML is a programming language" thing. Which is what I thought it was. I thought I had learned something new, but it turned out I was right again :-( -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
