Notions of information: remarks on Fresco's paper

We compare Fresco's analysis of the Turing machine-based notion of computation with that of others, in particular with functional programming and with the reversible computing paradigm of Toffoli and others. We conclude that, although much useful philosophical work can be done by the sort of analysis that Fresco proposes, there is, nevertheless, always likely to be a number of individually viable but different accounts of computation. Keywords Analysis of computation * Functional programming * Reversible computing
1 Introduction Fresco's article asks whether really existing computers can be considered as information processors, and, in order to answer this question, it considers four current notions of information: Shannon's [...]