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From: John Savard <quadibloc@servername.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Continuations
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2024 10:00:59 -0600
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On Mon, 15 Jul 2024 01:59:58 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>It only has to be Turing-equivalent (or Lisp-equivalent) to be a “general-
>purpose” machine. There’s nothing in that criterion that requires gotos.

It's true that Turing-equivalence is sufficient to allow a computer
with sufficient storage available to do anything.

However, the term "general-purpose" can have other meanings. The sense
in which I was using it was: a machine that is _efficient_ at running
programs written in all popular programming languages for the kinds of
applications for which computers are normally used. Thus, the IBM
System/360 was general-purpose since it had string manipulation
instructions and decimal arithmetic in addition to floating-point and
binary integer arithmetic.

John Savard