Re: A case for HTML as a programming language

From: Arthur J. O'Dwyer (ajo_at_nospam.andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: 11/30/04 

Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:07:40 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Programmer Dude wrote:
>
> gswork writes:
>> the question of HTML as a language is one of those interesting ones
>
> Speak for yourself! I don't find it interesting in the least! (-:
> One more time: HTML is a ***markup*** language. It is a "meta"
> language for adding meta information to an information stream.
> That you can use it to cobble together something that resembles a
> running program doesn't change this.

I agree with you that HTML is a markup language, and that this thread
has been dominated by people's confusion between FSMs and "real"
Turing-complete languages. (Scare quotes intentional---I don't think
Turing-completeness is the defining aspect of a programming language,
though I don't have any idea what is. I think you can have non-TC
programming languages, and I think you can have things which are TC
that nobody in his right mind would call a "programming language."
YMMV.)

   But I wouldn't be surprised if Turing-completeness had slipped into
HTML somewhere along the way, the same way TC seems to slip into any
sufficiently complex tool (TeX, Excel, the C++ template preprocessor...)
So I find that question interesting. Not terribly /deep/, no---it's
just a yes-or-no question ("Is HTML 4.0 Turing-complete?")---but
I would like to know the answer sometime.

   It's getting pushed farther and farther down my interest stack, though;
I've gone off on a Metafont kick now. (Metafont is Turing-complete! ;)

-Arthur,
fickle

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