1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is
practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science
by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a
certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in
the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have
capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most
powerful and elegantly designed computers. However, no machine or
language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built
(other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be
horribly slow and far too painful to use. A Turing tar-pit is any
computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is,
it's theoretically universal -- but in practice, the harder you
struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck
you in. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}.
2. The perennial {holy wars} over whether language A or B is the
"most powerful".
[glossary]