This is true of any language, though. Consider a function pointer in C. You can prototype all day long, but what if your prototype leads to a function pointer that gets borked partway through and you get a dump? What about NullPointerException in Java? This is all halting problem material, too. This isn't a perl issue. Part of the turing machine in models of computation is the tape and the read head; nowhere does it say that the Turing machine is omniscient of the entire input stream.

Am I the only one unimpressed?

As for reference material, I often wrongly assume everyone went through comp sci. I did undergrad and grad modcomp from two different- but now out of print- textbooks. There are different books now, such as the one by Michael Sipser (Introduction to the Theory of Computation) that should cover computability theory, turing machines, and automata.

If it matters any, I remember /facepalm'ing many times through both of those courses at how obvious and unimpressive it was, just formalizations and proofs of what you already (probably) know.

In reply to Re^7: Unparseability is A Good Thing by Zen
in thread Unparseability is A Good Thing by Jeffrey Kegler

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