Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by valarauca1 4513 days ago
The mov operator in x86 assembly is technically Turning Complete onto itself [1]. I believe you'd be hard pressed to get smaller then that.

[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sd601/papers/mov.pdf

1 comments

I'm impressed. What I'm thinking more of is what types of functions and specific functions do you need? So also add, subtract...
Nothing about Turing completeness requires the presence of functions. You're probably looking for a useful language, but you'll have trouble making that criterion rigorous.
All you need is mov (and, technically, a single unconditional branch in each program). You can implement add, subtract, etc. using that.

Perhaps the question you want an answer to is not actually the one you asked? In any case, a programming language does not have to look like ALGOL. Most of the very simple ones do not.