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I hear this phrase often and do not fully understand it's meaning. What does it mean? And if possible, is there an example?
thank you!
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"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports a flat Earth on its back.
According to Professor of Philosophy Joel Richeimer, the phrase “turtles all the way down” stems from a story about the British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
This usually refers to self-hosting programming languages, where the interpreter or compiler is written in the same language that is being interpreted/compiled. It can also refer to the libraries for the language being written in the language itself.
Smalltalk and Lisp are well known for this kind of thing.
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Turtles all the way down is a phrase sometimes used to refer to infinite recursion. For example, what is the least integer? There isn't one. -2 is less than -1, -3 is less than -2 and so on. There is no bottom. The original source of the quote was an answer to the question of "If the world is on the back of a turtle, what does the turtle stand on?". Anyway, it doesn't have any programming specific meaning that I know of.
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