this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
1618 points (98.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
32710 readers
41 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
there is an additional layer to this joke for those who understand turing completeness. And it elevates it to a whole other level of snark.
Are you implying that an assembly language consisting of just ret, int3 and jmp (and nop, of course) is turing-complete? ...are you sure about that?
Bookmarking your comment so I can come back to it in a couple hours, if I hopefully remember to.
But yes, almost. I don't think the interrupt is necessary and the return isn't under certain architectures. I have a doc on my computer somewhere where I was investigating what the absolute minimum was to make a turning complete machine and, to my recollection, there was only 4-6 instructions that were absolutely necessary. The ones I remember off the top of my head are NAND, MOV, JUMPIF, and then I believe I included NOP in accordance with some principle. RET and INT were convenience features in this design.
Fun fact: apparently on x86 just MOV all by itself is Turing-complete, without even using it to produce self-modifying code (paper, C compiler).