Re:The Power of One-State Turing Machines (2018)
by mcguire on Saturday November 23, 2019 @10:46AM
(#21614657)
Short pithy answer: Exact real arithmetic is still an open research problem.
Slightly longer answer: To the extent that they are formal languages, they both have the same ability to express things.
More philosophical answer: Mathematics has a tradition of extension. Have a new idea you want to express as concisely as possible because you are going to be using it a lot? Grab a handful of Greek letters, symbols, funny fonts, and random other typography, and go to town. Outside of Lisp,[1] this flexibility is hard to do in most programming languages.
Slightly longer answer: To the extent that they are formal languages, they both have the same ability to express things.
More philosophical answer: Mathematics has a tradition of extension. Have a new idea you want to express as concisely as possible because you are going to be using it a lot? Grab a handful of Greek letters, symbols, funny fonts, and random other typography, and go to town. Outside of Lisp,[1] this flexibility is hard to do in most programming languages.
[1] But inside a dog, it's too dark to read.