Re: A case for HTML as a programming language

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/01/04 

Date: 30 Nov 2004 19:01:55 -0800

Michael Mendelsohn <keine.Werbung.1300@msgid.michael.mendelsohn.de> wrote in message news:<41907B74.2B3EBFD7@msgid.michael.mendelsohn.de>...
> "Arthur J. O'Dwyer" schrieb:
> > On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Michael Mendelsohn wrote:
>
> > Steven Rudich does exactly this in his "Great Theoretical Ideas" course
> > at CMU. :) This is during the lecture in which he points out that it's
> > impossible to tell "from the outside" how many states (pages) a finite
> > state machine (website) has, if all the outsider can see is "accept" or
> > "reject" (the page text) for the current state (page).
>
> Ah, I've had that bookmarked already, for a time when I've got time.
>
> > > If we are talking about Turing machines with finite memories, i.e.
> > > finite tapes,
> >
> > Ah, but a Turing machine without an infinite tape is not a Turing
> > machine! So you mean "If we are talking about finite state machines,"
> > and you already said that. ;)
>
> Well, we've discussed this here, and no computer ever made had an
> infinite tape...

Yeah, we have, and nobody yet understands mathematical intuitionism,
apparently.

The Turing tape doesn't have to be physically infinite and in fact
will work fine with a finite set of squares (Web pages!? Yikes. OK.)

The problem is that it must have the Intuitionist capability of ADDING
a tape square to the left or right of the working set at any time.
Turing was of course silent on how this operation would be
implemented, whether splicing the tape as in film school, or moseying
down to CDW for memory chips.

Thanks to Anglo-American philosophical hegemony as it infects computer
science, nearly all computer scientists are unconscious Platonists who
believe only in one type of infinity, a finished and perfected
infinity ("infinite in all directions"). This has produced the nasty
phenomenon of American "scientific fundamentalism" and its nealry
religious intolerance, not only of religion, but also of imagination.

To my knowledge pure HTML cannot do this but I will check out this
discussion at greater leisure to see if it can. Who knows what dark
secrets the script kiddies know? Hell, I'm a script kiddie according
to some clowns in this ng. I wrote a compiler in Visual Basic, which
was blasphemy in some circles. If someone can write a Turing Machine
simulator in pure HTML with no constant restriction on states, squares
or symbols, then I will admit that pure HTML is Turing complete.

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