Re:Hey, C Is a Functional Language Too
by charliesome on Friday November 02, 2012 @10:08AM
(#4732651)
Any physical machine cannot be Turing complete because it has a finite amount of RAM.
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Re:Hey, C Is a Functional Language Too
by fauigerzigerk on Friday November 02, 2012 @10:18AM
(#4732681)
Sure, but we're talking about whether or not this particular style of C can be Turing complete and I'm not sure it is, even on a machine with an infinite amout of RAM.
A machine with an infinite amount of RAM can have an infinite stack size.
Re:Hey, C Is a Functional Language Too
by fauigerzigerk on Friday November 02, 2012 @10:35AM
(#4732767)
C arrays that live on the stack have to be created with a constant size (at least before C99). It's a limitation of the language regardless of any machine or stack size.
If we're going to grant that a machine can have infinite ram, surely we can grant that a spec of C can have infinite stack allocated arrays... :)
That's already been granted in this argument. The question now is, given an infinite stack, is this programming style Turing-complete?