Hi all,
a bit off topic for Python Tutor, but I am think there are decent odds
that folks here both know good resources and have an idea of what
level would be appropriate for me. So, I hope no one minds.
A recent thread on comp.lang.python has touched on to what extent C
was written in C. I know PyPy aims to implement Python in Python. I
believe I've heard that many lisp fans think you don't have a language
unless you can write the language's interpreter in the language
itself. (Perhaps one or more of these claims is a bit inaccurate, but
the substance seems right.)
This sounds, to the untutored, rather like magic. (It reminds me of a
line from the German mathematician and philosopher, Gottlob Frege,
who, in a book on the foundations of arithmetic, characterized an
opposing position as akin to "trying to pull yourself out of the swamp
by your own top-knot" -- which, I can only assume, is even funnier in
the original 19th c. German ;-) Naively, one thinks that to write
anything in C, you'd have to *have* C to write in, etc.
Now's not the time in my life to start a comp. sci. degree. So, my
questions are:
1) What would be good terms to google for to find an explanation of
how the seeming magic doesn't violate all reason?
2) Much harder, so please pass unless you've a link you know of
off-hand: any recommendations of particular things that I could read?
If you are interested in a more abstract explanation on this, you can read up on one reason why lisp programmers are such fans of writting lisp interpreters in lisp: Turing Machines (TM). Abstract computer constructs that, arguably, are equivalent to your desktop computer in terms of programming. They are really for theoretical research, especially good for algorithm creation. But one of the early algorithms was to create a TM with a TM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/
You'll be able to find a lot more hits on any web search.
-Arcege
--
There's so many different worlds,
So many different suns.
And we have just one world,
But we live in different ones.
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