Wasn't it Tom Melly who wrote:
>What is the minimum required for a fully-functional programming language?
>(i.e. one in which, theoretically, you could perform any calculation).
>
>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).

When I was at university, I worked on an Elliot 903 computer that had a
machine code which had only 16 instructions, and one of those was a 
no-op. Two other instructions could have been omitted ("increment in
place" and "decrement in place") without making much impact on the
usability of the language.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

Post a reply to this message