If a language comes with variables, conditionals, and gotos, does that make it Turing-complete?

Question

anonymous · Answer

If the language can solve any problem then yes it can be said to be Turing-complete, time and memory being available of course.

anonymous · Answer

Not if it can solve "any problem"  a computer can't solve, for example, the meaning of life as we know it.

anonymous · Answer

A turing complete language can solve any computable function

anonymous · Answer

or, simulate a turing machine.  Check out the wikipedia on this.  The features of a language must map to the basics of a turing machine, then yes it would be turing complete.

anonymous · Answer

I think variables, conditionals, and gotos are enough. Think about what a Turing machine does: read, write, move the tape, and then it reacts to whatever is on the tape. You might actually be able to get away with not having the variables. Functional languages like scheme and lisp don't use assignment the same way a language like C or python would and they're still Turing complete.

I think the best thing to do would be to evaluate each language on its own and prove that it's Turing complete or not. If you prove one language like C to be TC, then you can easily show that something like C++ that can do everything C can do, is also TC. But if you ask this to enough geeks I'm sure someone would come up with a completely useless non-Turing complete language that still has the things you mention, just to prove us wrong.