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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 05 May 2012 04:16:44 -0500
From: "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org>
Newsgroups: comp.programming
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Subject: Re: quantifying bloat
Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 10:16:45 +0100
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Xref: csiph.com comp.programming:1539

Willem wrote:

[...]
> ) pi is not computable.
>
> Again: According to mathematicians, it *is* computable.

Not only according to mathematicians.  It's no esoteric insight of higher 
mathematics, just a plain old ordinary fact that you can compute arbitrarily 
many digits of pi on a real computer.  Subject only to time and memory 
constraints.

And being willing to write/lookup/borrow a few lines of code...

Of course, as you stated earlier, the word computable has a specific technical 
definition (or, more accurately, a number of /provably/ identical technical 
definitions); and it is certainly true that [the infinite sequence of digits 
of] pi is computable under that definition.  But you (i.e. "one") don't need to 
know that to see that pi is computable -- just /do/ it ;-)

(Technical note for Dmirty -- when you said that pi isn't computable by a 
finite state automaton, you are perfectly correct, but that is not the same as 
"not computable".  That phrase refers to any one of a /specific/ set of 
equivalent computational models which are /not/ equivalent to FSA.)

    -- chris