Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn C or Pascal?]

[Craig Franck <clfranck@worldnet.att.net>]

"Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com> wrote:
>Bob Cousins <bob@lintilla.demon.co.uk> wrote in article
><322f864d.42836625@news.demon.co.uk>...


>> Finally, you or may not consider that the human brain is a biological
>> computer, and that does not appear to work by fetching instructions
>> and executing them. So the very concept of instructions executing in
>> sequence is an illusion created within our own non-digital,
>> non-sequential, massively parallel active memory analog computer.
>
>The human brain works (as far as anyone knows) by electrical patterns
>flowing through neurons.  You have input from your senses which
>stimulates pathways in your brain, and produces changes in the
>memory structures, and possibly produces output through muscular
>manipulations.

Yes, but the *order* of the instructions might be an illusion.


                     *
             ()               *
            earth   star A  star B

Say star A is 50 light years from Earth and star B is 100 light
years away. If A went super nova 50 years ago and B went super nova
100 years ago they appear to explode at the same time. Without 
advanced astronomical knowledge you would have no idea of the
real order in which they exploded.

If I run a program to sum a matrix of 100 numbers on a computer
with multiple execution units and several concurrent tasks, I
may have no clue in what order matrix was summed. Dependancies
will be checked and one or more execution units may be available
or not. The idea of a descrete number of steps occuring in a fixed
order would be an illusion for some steps may occur simultaneously.

>*There is no view other than the procedural view*.
>
>Everything comes down to data transformations over time.  You
>have yet to come up with an example where this is not true, and
>you won't, simply because you can't eliminate the time axis.  An
>algorithm has to have a beginning and an end, an input and an
>output, and in the middle is a black box known as the "procedure".

In a sufficently complex vector unit, everything could literally 
happen at once. So what actually happened in the "black box" might
never be acutally known, at least as far as the order in which things
occured. You can of coarse enforce inorder execution.

There can be "a set of ordered steps for solving a problem", but the 
order might be an illusion. That a computer is a "deterministic finite
state machine" is true but you could simulate one with say, groups of human 
beings pretending to be registers and doing the logic funcions in there 
heads, even though people are not "finite state" or *perhaps* 
deterministic. In this case just when and how certain things occurred
could be imposible to find out. I could lie and say that I
did some of the logic when it was someone else. How could you even
begin to model this as a state machine? Some of the behavour would
truely be random. The time line would still be there but with no
way to lay out the events the model loses it's straight "procedural"
look and feel. What if I just randomly guessed at the value of a 
logic function? Is that procedural? How come one number popped into
my head and not another?

Also, since my debugger can run a program backwards your time line
may have to be able to go in reverse. :-)



-- 
Craig  
clfranck@worldnet.att.net    
Manchester, NH
A great many people think they are thinking when they are
merely rearranging their prejudices.  -- William James