Re: Aspiring highest-order programmer

From: Programmer Dude (Chris_at_Sonnack.com)
Date: 06/08/04 

Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 08:22:51 -0500

Alf P. Steinbach writes:

>>> The error in your thinking is obvious to me, but perhaps not to you...

When ya go that bold, ya always wanna make sure you're on firm ground!

> One simple example of a script that depends on the language is a script
> that outputs its own script text.
>
> One simple example of a script that depends on the execution environment
> is one that outputs the name of the interpreter.

Doesn't the *act* of outputing depend on the environment?

> ...this single little script corresponds to an infinite number of
> assembler language (say) programs.

I think what you may not be seeing is that any single assembler program
ALSO corresponds to an infinite number of OTHER assembler programs (or
other scripts, for that matter).

That the mapping is somewhat "noisier" is moot. The bottom line is
that anything a script can command a machine to do, so can assembler.

As a related, on topic tangent, one of many webpages I read while doing
some refreshing on Platonism was an essay by a guy who sought to equate
lambda forms with Platonic objects. A big part of his success in that
depends on agreeing (and he admits this article of faith here) that
the human mind is mechanistic (and hence reproducable programmatically).

If you don't buy that (and I don't), his argument falls back to drawing
strong parallels between lambda forms and Platonic objects. But that's
not why I bring this up.

You can read it (quite interesting, I thought) at:
http://home.ican.net/~arandall/Plato/
(WARNING: typed in by hand from the printed page.)

One thing he touches on in laying foundation is the equivalence of pure
sets and the requirement of an *external* *function* to give meaning to
the set. For the less theoretically inclined, the next few paragraphs
explain what that means. If you already, know, skip to "HERE"

Topologists will tell you there's no difference between the donut and
the coffee cup. Both are solids with a single hole in them. Similarly,
sets of different things are--in a sets theory sense--indentical. The
set [A B C] is really not different from [X Y Z] or [1 2 3]. All can
be reduced to [(()) (()()) (()()())] where () is the null set.

So, point is, sets have no meaning in themselves. What gives them
meaning is something external that "processes" the set. Church (of
Church-Turing fame) came up with "lambda-calculus", which adds a
function external to the set. The LISP language is a lambda-calculus
language; the primary, dominating, used 99% of the time syntactical
form is a lambda expression: (f A B C) Where "f" is a function and
"A"-"C" is the set.

So, bottom line, sets have no intrinsic meaning, and they only take on
meaning when intrepreted from the outside. (Another manifestation
of Godel--no set can contain, or explain, itself!)

And now we're....

HERE

The point is, there is always a function that processes *any* ordered
set of symbols. Call it (f in out) or, if you hate LISP, f(in, out).
Where:
        in = <some-script-or-assembler>
        out = <some-target-machinecode>

The only difference is that scripts blatently address an abstraction
of an exec environment, whereas asm speaks to a more concrete one.
This difference just makes it easier to write interpreters for scripts
than for assemblers, but only convenience (and user demand) make this
so. IN PRINCIPLE, there simply is no difference. 

-- 
|_ CJSonnack <Chris@Sonnack.com> _____________| How's my programming? |
|_ http://www.Sonnack.com/ ___________________| Call: 1-800-DEV-NULL  |
|_____________________________________________|_______________________|

Relevant Pages

  • NEW ciasdis: a reverse engineering system
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    (comp.programming)
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