Re: What Lua can do that other programming languages can't do?

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:22 PM, José Passes <jose.passes@gmx.com> wrote:
> On 03/06/2013 09:56 PM, Coda Highland wrote:
>>
>> This is a common fallacy. Being Turing-complete only determines what
>> algorithms you can compute, but there's a lot more to programming than
>> just algorithms. INTERCAL is Turing-complete, but it can't open any
>> windows on your screen; Conway's Game of Life is Turing-complete, but
>> you can't use it as an embedded script interpreter.
>
>
> I'm sure that if you put enough money on the line, someone will be keen to
> prove you wrong.  Turing-complete is all it is actually required, the rest
> is just implementation details, and the amount of legwork it would take to
> prove a point.
>

Those implementation details are what define the differences between
languages, therefore the claim stands. If you did the legwork to
extend INTERCAL to be able to call C libraries, the resulting language
would no longer be INTERCAL, but INTERCAL with extensions;
alternatively, if you wrapped INTERCAL with a shell that parsed the
output of an INTERCAL algorithm and invoked an outside function based
on that, you haven't made INTERCAL able to do it but instead you've
constructed a system that can do it using another language.

/s/ Adam