Many people are surprised when they hear that sed is Turing complete. How come a text filtering program is Turing complete they ask? Turns out sed is like a small assembly language that has a comparison operation, a branching operation and a temporary buffer. If you translate a problem into a textual representation then these operations are enough to make sed Turing complete!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] threadMany people are surprised when they hear that sed is Turing complete. How come a text filtering program is Turing complete they ask? Turns out sed is like a small assembly language that has a comparison operation, a branching operation and a temporary buffer. If you translate a problem into a textual representation then these operations are enough to make sed Turing complete!