A Programming Approach to Computability

Computability theory is at the heart of theoretical computer science. Yet, ironically, many of its basic results were discovered by mathematical logicians prior to the development of the first stored-program computer. As a result, many texts on computability theory strike today's computer science students as far removed from their concerns. To remedy this, we base our approach to computability on the language of while-programs, a lean subset of PASCAL, and postpone consideration of such cla...