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gentoo | 2 years ago

the distinction is real in the model of the turing machine, and it's close to real in many of the machines and programs we've built so far. It's not real in nature, in brains. Code is data and vice versa. A memory is a program that runs and reinforces itself.

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philipov|2 years ago

and in programming languages like Lisp, "Code is Data" is a mantra that forms a fundamental design principle.

smolder|2 years ago

Before we started restricting execution to areas of memory designated as code regions for security reasons, self-modifying code was a technique occasionally used to reduce memory footprint or optimize hot loops. IIRC early MS-DOS used that trick, implemented by Gates himself.