Friday, October 28, 2011

Jack and Turing completeness

From the previous posts on Jack's primitive capabilities it should be pretty obvious that it is turing complete. It supports sequences and selection naturally; and allows iteration of any node's children.

The intent, however, is to NOT use Jack as a primary programming language. I do not see a hello world in Jack's future - at least not in the conventional sense.

Jack's Turing completeness is intended to provide a full complement of computing power so that program logic may be effectively TRANSFORMED. The more appropriate set of hello world would programs may be:

  • A program that edited another program and represented the editing as a sequence of Jack steps
  • A program that reasoned about another program using Jack
  • A program that expressed the history of a program and exposed its "why" using Jack
  • A program that expressed the future roadmap of a program using Jack

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