Besides the fact this is a blatant straw man argument, Turing machines are also well defined. Which means "Flexible is not an antonym of well defined".

1) That's not just some straw man. Unfortunately, that's an example from real life. I've maintained code that had a finite state machine to emulate function calls embedded in... Perl, which does function calls: that is, a general state machine calling another general state machine. The author maintained that adding the list of functions to be called (with different names) as a list instead of "recursive function calls" was somehow easier to understand. He was proud of how flexible and dynamic it was. He's one of many bad Perl coders I wish I'd never met. :-(

2) The machine is well defined. It's operation is not; it varies depending on the input, which is not specified. Is that specific enough for you?

In reply to Re^5: defining methods on the fly by Anonymous Monk
in thread defining methods on the fly by flogic

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