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by gentoo 1141 days ago
the distinction is real in the model of the turing machine, and it's close to real in many of the machines and programs we've built so far. It's not real in nature, in brains. Code is data and vice versa. A memory is a program that runs and reinforces itself.
2 comments

and in programming languages like Lisp, "Code is Data" is a mantra that forms a fundamental design principle.
Before we started restricting execution to areas of memory designated as code regions for security reasons, self-modifying code was a technique occasionally used to reduce memory footprint or optimize hot loops. IIRC early MS-DOS used that trick, implemented by Gates himself.