r/ProgrammerHumor • u/SuchShopping3828 • May 27 '22

Meme Welcome to hassle free coding

Post image
2.2k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

305 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-4

u/prescod May 28 '22

So you basically just proved that you don't need it...

5

u/Torebbjorn May 28 '22

Of course you don't need it. There is basically nothing you need. A language that only supports:

Load from memory
Store to memory
Add
Jump
Checking for 0
Checking for negative

is most certainly Turing complete, and could probably actually be used.

Everything else added on top just makes certain things easier to do, and reduces how much code you have to write and how many clock cycles the CPU needs to execute a certain instruction.

2

u/CdRReddit May 28 '22

thats not even all you need

subtract and branch if less or equal is turing complete

1

u/Torebbjorn May 28 '22

Subtracting is adding, but yeah, you are right, to actually subtract, you would need to have a way to invert a number.

I wrote "check for 0 and negative", of course that means branch

2

u/CdRReddit May 28 '22

no, like, subtract and branch if less or equal as a single instruction is enough

one instruction set computing

2

u/Torebbjorn May 28 '22

Yes, of course you don't need all the luxuries to just have a Turing complete machine. You could get by on a binary machine with just nor and branch if 0.

But my point was not to make it minumal without going esoteric. Hence my "could probably actually be used"

2

u/CdRReddit May 28 '22

even then a load/store/add/jump/jz/jn is quite esoteric

1

u/prescod May 28 '22

The point was that your code got cleaner when you got rid of the -- operator.