Adrian, (01)
That argument is the reddest of red herrings: (02)
AW> The problem with the "syllogisms will never work" argument
> is that, if you allow them to be recursive, they have Turing
> machine power. That means that they can compute anything that
> can be computed. (03)
Every major programming language (e.g., FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP,
ALGOL, PL/I, C, C++, C#, Ada, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.)
has the following two properties: (04)
1. They have the power of a Turing machine. (05)
2. It's undecidable whether an arbitrary program written in
any of those languages will terminate. (06)
Yet properties #1 and #2 have never stopped anybody from using
those languages for major mission-critical applications. In
fact, today's economy would grind to a halt (not just a recession)
if people stopped using programming languages with the power of
a Turing machine. (07)
John (08)
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