How many of you like HP41C calculators?

If you've stayed with me this long, you have my condolances. However, there's one more interesting point that comes out here. This sub-thread was sparked by the question of whether the potential of self-modifying code was necessary in order to be a computer. Notice that with the definition above, any computer can implement a universal Turing machine and unless you engage in some unnatural limitations, such a machine can modify it's own programming. (Remember that a universal Turing machine interprets instructions read from the tape.) A more prosaic way of looking at this same point is that I don't need a von Neumann architecture to implement an interpreter which interprets self-modifying code. And if computing theory teaches us anything, adding or removing levels of abstraction doesn't affect the basic power of the model.