## An Enumerable Infinity of Names ### Or: One character RAM ### Or: Unicode on a napkin ![[turing-1936-37.png]] 0: Ok pause here for a second. 1: What's up? 0: Read that highlighed bit. 1: What about it? 0: I mean that's a pretty wacky idea no? | One Char RAM | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Can be erased? | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | | Paper Contents | 0 | L | 1 | ד | 0 | ్ | 1 | 根 | 1 | Ω | | Paper Address | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | ![[turing-1936-38.png]] ![[turing-1936-39.png]] ![[turing-1936-40.png]] ![[turing-1936-41.png]] ![[turing-1936-42.png]] ![[turing-1936-43.png]] ![[turing-1936-44.png]] ![[turing-1936-45.png]] ![[turing-1936-46.png]] ![[turing-1936-47.png]] ![[turing-1936-48.png]] ![[turing-1936-49.png]] ![[turing-1936-50.png]] Ok so back to Turing. He had this completely ridiculous and impractical idea of "single character RAM", and if you need more storage space you just "add more symbols" somehow. That ridiculous idea turns out to be pretty reasonable actually, but we'd have to wait over half a century before UTF-8 would be invented in order to be able to do something like that. And even if we could do Turing's idea, modern computers don't do that. They just write to some other location that isn't interleaved with our output bytes. But Turing's idea was really creative given the limited setup he was working with in the paper. So back to the paper. Next up, Turing invents shared libraries. Or functions. Same idea sort of. ![[turing-1936-51.png]] ![[turing-1936-52.png]] ![[turing-1936-53.png]] ![[turing-1936-54.png]] On page 7 with the "Functions that take machine states as inputs," 1 asks if this is like metaprogramming. 0 says it's just programming, because "machine states" are basically just variables in the address space. ![[turing-1936-55.png]] ![[turing-1936-56.png]] ![[turing-1936-57.png]] ![[turing-1936-58.png]] ![[turing-1936-59.png]] ![[turing-1936-60.png]] ![[turing-1936-61.png]] ![[turing-1936-62.png]] 1: This Dungeons and Dragons alphabet is making it harder to read. 0: Nah I think this example was just hard. Turing feels the same way. Here look: > The last example seems somewhat more difficult to interpret than most. > -Top of pg 8. ![[turing-1936-63.png]] ![[turing-1936-64.png]] ![[turing-1936-65.png]] ![[turing-1936-66.png]] ![[turing-1936-67.png]] ![[turing-1936-68.png]]