Re: Initial Draft Finding on Principle of Least Power

Jon Hanna writes:

> The client-side Javascript on most browsers (all of them AFAIK)
> is not strictly Turing-complete because the interpreter is 
> interrupts the processing after a certain length of time (with 
> the intention of stopping infinite loops or other code that 
> will run for a very long time) - a languge executed any such 
> interpreter is not strictly Turing 
> complete.

Right, but in this finding we're more concerned with facilitating reuse of 
data than preventing infinite loops.  In principle, the fact that 
execution is bounded in time does help:  you can just let the program run 
for 3 seconds and see whether it produces anything.  In practice, that's 
not the sort of analysis we're looking for I think.   If I write a program 
in Java or Javascript the fact that you plan to kill it after a few 
seconds doesn't give me the advantages of a more declarative language when 
I'm looking to pull information out of the program.

So, for that reason, I'm disinclined to complicate the finding by talking 
about this distinction.  Does that make sense?  If not, maybe I'm missing 
something.  Thanks.

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Thursday, 22 December 2005 22:46:10 UTC