On Wednesday, November 19, 2003, at 10:17 PM, Vintage Computer
Festival wrote:
> 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
What does "closure" mean?
>> 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 - 22:35:24 GMT