Here's the draft of an abstract for a colloquium talk I'm giving at Indiana next month. Suggestions for what I should *call* this talk? I was thinking "It's all just interpreters!" or "Interpreters everywhere!", and then @ganshen suggested "Interpreters: the ultimate abstraction" -- am I audacious enough to call it that?
(Feedback welcome on other aspects of it, too!)
@lindsey @InfiniteNutshell @regehr @ccshan of course it would 😅😅😅😅
(I'm a strong believer in 'a compiler is an interpreter'. Obviously a jit has interpreter like qualities. Then there's abstract interpretation in many compilers. Partial evaluation is also interpretation that compiles at the same time. Additionally you can also write a lot of compiler passes as slightly weird interpreters that go along the program, (abstractly) execute bits of it and produce another program as a side effect)
@cfbolz I'm still stuck on the shredder: nothing it does has to do with the structure or interpretation of the text on its input page. not an interpreter.
If you want something machine-shaped in that square maybe "a linotype machine is a computer".
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I giggled so hard at “shredder”
@cfbolz @lindsey More seriously though, I think of a generalized interpreter as anything that turns syntax into semantics. According to that definition, a choir really does fit the bill to a T: it turns syntax (musical notation) into semantics (sound).
To me, shredder is the odd one out: there is no plausible sense in which a shredder turns text into semantics. Inspired by the example of a choir, I might suggest "actor" for that cell: an actor turns syntax (a textual script) into semantics (a performance). (Shredder is funnier though...)
I am also not so sure about Excel: yes, it operates on text, but I don't think it takes text and turns it into semantics. Maybe "text adventure game"?
@byorgey @lindsey we are clearly strongly overanalyzing this, but why couldn't confetti be semantics?
I didn't want to use Zork, too close to doom. Anyway, Excel is Turing complete, so clearly it's a fine interpreter (nowadays the formula language is very powerful: https://eusprig.org/wp-content/uploads/2309.00115.pdf but you can also simulate a turing machine directly by using rows as the tape, and just have many rows for the time axis. so all that is missing is an infinite grid).
@cfbolz @lindsey Confetti could be semantics, but it's not the semantics *of the text on the paper being shredded*. It's the semantics of an extremely simple "program" embedded into the hardware of the shredder.
Yes, Excel's formula language is Turing complete, but if you're thinking of it that way, then it should go in the top left.
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