this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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there is an additional layer to this joke for those who understand turing completeness. And it elevates it to a whole other level of snark.
Are you implying that an assembly language consisting of just ret, int3 and jmp (and nop, of course) is turing-complete? ...are you sure about that?
Bookmarking your comment so I can come back to it in a couple hours, if I hopefully remember to.
But yes, almost. I don't think the interrupt is necessary and the return isn't under certain architectures. I have a doc on my computer somewhere where I was investigating what the absolute minimum was to make a turning complete machine and, to my recollection, there was only 4-6 instructions that were absolutely necessary. The ones I remember off the top of my head are NAND, MOV, JUMPIF, and then I believe I included NOP in accordance with some principle. RET and INT were convenience features in this design.
Fun fact: apparently on x86 just MOV all by itself is Turing-complete, without even using it to produce self-modifying code (paper, C compiler).