VIvidarh·Nov 2, 2023
I don't think you understand how little it takes to have Turing complete computation, and how hard it is to stop even end-users from accessing it, much less companies or a motivated nation state. The "war on general-purpose computation" is more like a "war on convenient general-purpose computation for end users who aren't motivated or skilled enough to work around it".
Are you going to ban all spreadsheets? The ability to run SQL queries? The ability to do simple regexp based search replace? The ability for users to template mail responses and set up mail filters? All of those allows general purpose computation either directly or as part of a system where each part may seem innocuous (e.g. the simple ability to repeatedly trigger the same operation is enough to make regexp based search and replace Turing complete; the ability to pass mess
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ages between a templated mailing list system and mail filters can be Turing complete even if neither the template system and filter in isolation is)
The ability for developers to test their own code without having it reviewed and signed off by someone trustworthy before each and every run?
Let one little mechanism through and the whole thing is moot.
EDIT: As an illustration, here's a Turing machine using only Notepad++'s find/replace:
https://github.com/0xdanelia/regex_turing_machine