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

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 5:51 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Coda Highland once stated:
>> 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
>
>   The following video:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
>
> shows an implementation of Conway's Game of Life, written in Conways' Game
> of Life.  Granted, the bottom layer of this is written in something else,
> but it's turtles all the way down.
>
>   Let me explain:  Lua (not LuaJIT, but Lua) runs on a virtual byte-machine
> that is interpreted by code written in C.  This C code, in turn, has been
> converted to machine code by a computer.  This machine code, in turn, is
> being interpreted by the CPU.  In essence, it's all interpreters, all the
> way down.
>
>   Further more, if I were to write a CPU emulator in INTERCAL, then load the
> C-written library into said emulator so I can "call" routines contained
> therein,, do I still have INTERCAL with extensions?  Or just INTERCAL?  And
> if someone can "write" Conway's Game of Life, using Conway's Game of Life,
> then how difficult could it be to write an embedded script interpreter in
> in?
>
>   Turing turtles all the way down ...
>
>   -spc (Stop all this silliness!  Stop I say! </montypython>)
>
>
>

Wasn't one of the ideas behind Plan9 that anything could be done by
just file I/O? So all a language technically needed was
turing-completeness and access to file syscalls.

-- 
Sent from my Game Boy.