Summary
Over many familiar datatypes the notion of “computable” coincides with the notion of “flowchartable”. It is also known that flowcharts are not a universal programming formalism over arbitrary datatypes, in the sense that there are datatypes over which not all computable functions are flowchartable. In this paper we consider various extensions and restrictions of the basic formalism of flowcharts, and then for every such formalism, we characterize the datatypes over which the computable functions are exactly the functions programmable in this formalism. We say that a function is computable over a datatype if it is effective relative to the primitive operations and relations of the datatype.
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Kfoury, A.J., Urzyczyn, P. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the universality of programming formalisms. Acta Informatica 22, 347–377 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00288773
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00288773