On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, William R. Buckley wrote:
> Moreover, there is the _analog computer_ with programming very
> similar to the unit record equipment, and such machines have always
> been known as computers.
Hardly. That's like saying French and Spanish are the same language
because they share a common character set. They are computers in a wholly
different sense of the word and have nothing at all to do with a Turing
Machine, and thereby this discussion has suddenly drifted off into bizarre
and meaningless abstracts.
> The important point for computation is closure, and Turing is the
> ideal model. It is not efficient, it is not pretty but, all systems that
> exhibit computational closure are Turing machine equivalents, and
> this is the foundation of computer science.
Including analog computers and unit record equipment?
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Nov 19 2003 - 22:17:27 GMT