Re: Re: Re: Life beyond CGI and DBI

There are a great many things Perl simply cannot do

Yes. These things include:

Solving the Halting Problem
Parsing natural languages (yet)
Solving the Napsack Problem in polynomial-order time (or can it??? :-D )

I mean, come on... Perl is Turing Complete (standard boilerplate regarding assumptions about sufficient storage room, as Turing Machines, technically, have unlimitted memory), and thus can do anything that a Turing Machine is capable of. Every other programming language that currently exists (bearing in mind that there aren't any programming languages yet developed for quantum computers, which could, possibly be something beyond a Deterministic Turing Machine) is no more capable than a Turing Machine. Therefore, I can safely state that there is nothing which Perl "simply cannot do", but which other programming languages can do.

To paraphrase: Perl can do anything that can be done on a computer, and no programming language can make a computer do more than a computer is capable of doing.

Of course, you could have been trying to use hyperbole, or being figurative...

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:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq

Comment on Re: Re: Re: Life beyond CGI and DBI

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Re: Life beyond CGI and DBI by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 09, 2003 at 08:39 UTC
I mean, come on... Perl is Turing Complete (standard boilerplate regarding assumptions about sufficient storage room, as Turing Machines, technically, have unlimitted memory), and thus can do anything that a Turing Machine is capable of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Modern day computers however, aren't Turing Machines. We also want our programs to run fast (TM's, lacking random access memory aren't fast) and to interface. Ever tried reading the output of another program on a TM? Access a database from a TM? Play a DVD on a TM? While a TM is useful in discussing the solvability of an algoritmic problem, it's not very useful in discussing what you can do with a language, as programs do far more than reading predefined input from a tape and writing output to it. Abigail	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Life beyond CGI and DBI by Anonymous Monk on Oct 09, 2003 at 05:28 UTC
Let's see Perl produce a binary (no Perl on the system) to function as a device driver. Yes, Perl is a language specification, so you could compile code written to the specification to do this. Of course you're ultimately technically correct, but in all practicality it could not currently be done.	[reply]