Re:TLS/SSL implementation in Haskell
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @09:36PM
(#7563701)
Turing machines have undefined behavior in exactly the same way that C does. What do you suppose happens if a Turing machine reads from a location on the tape that has never been written? The value the machine observes in that circumstance is not required to be well-defined in order for the machine to be able to do all computations required of a Turing machine. Moreover, the more you add features of actual machines like parallelism and timers, the more opportunities for undefined behavior you introduce. What do you suppose a multiprocessor Turing machine does if you write concurrently to the tape without locking?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
"What do you suppose happens if a Turing machine reads from a location on the tape that has never been written?"
It reads the default symbol (see e.g. the description of a TM on Wikipedia). It's semantics are well-defined.
The semantics of TMs are well-defined. The semantics of C's "undefined behavior" is not well-defined.