In article <416ef01c@news.povray.org>,
 "Tom Melly" <pov### [at] tomandlucouk> wrote:

> What is the minimum required for a fully-functional programming language?
> (i.e. one in which, theoretically, you could perform any calculation).

IIRC, conditional jumps and addition are all that is required for a 
Turing-complete language. However, it'd be too much work to do anything 
useful with that kind of instruction set.

"Functional" has a special meaning in programming languages, but I 
assume you aren't talking about functional languages.


> iirc machine code seems to get by purely on 'ifs' and assignments - would in
> theory a language be functional that only had these two functions (and
> presumably the ability to loop over the whole code, but not individual
> sections of it).

Real machine code is a bit more extensive, with a lot of useful 
instructions that are faster to hard-wire on the processor than to 
compute using multiple instructions. (Some modern processors have a 
square root instruction, for example.)

The extreme would be CISC architectures, which give you a lot of 
instructions, and many forms of each. Then there are RISC architectures, 
which aim to simplify the processor electronics, and execute simpler 
instructions more rapidly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC

And you will probably find this interesting:
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=857484

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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