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by wolfgke 3390 days ago
> That characterization isn't enough to distinguish a Turing complete interpreter from something that trivially manipulates an input datum. An interpreter is just a program containing code paths, which are activated in response to the input (the interpreted code).

It is surprisingly simple to make an interpreter that is "accidentally" Turing complete (this IMHO so often happens by accident that I love to say that if an interpreter is not "obviously" more restricted than a Turing machine, it probably is Turing complete).

This is not just my opinion - there lots of pages in the internet of things that are "accidentally" Turing complete, for example:

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...

https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete