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Comment on C is not Turing-complete (2018)

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If we're going to have this argument, are we allowed to read/write to external storage? That would seem to me to circumvent the bounds of pointer address space.

The interface to the external storage only needs bidirectional sequential access rather than random access, so we don't even have to worry about the disk addresses becoming too large for the addressable internal memory.

are we allowed to read/write to external storage?

They did restrict the scope of their article to the standard only:

"This is an argument about the specification of C, not any particular implementation."

I don't think the spec has any representation of external storage in it.

FILE* is defined by the standard.

Thanks! I stand corrected.

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