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Isn't that something that can be helped by having a good standard library though (e.g. STL)? OpenZeppelin [1] is one example that comes to mind. There are als

Isn't that something that can be helped by having a good standard library though (e.g. STL)? OpenZeppelin [1] is one example that comes to mind. There are also other contract languages aimed to solve some of the limitations you mention, like Tezos/Michelson [2][3], which facilitate formal verification. The issues you point out are certainly valid, but I believe people in the space are cognizant of them and are working on solutions. [1] https://openzeppelin.org/ https://openzeppelin.org/ [2] https://www.tezos.com/ https://www.tezos.com/ [3] https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/language.pdf https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/language.pdf

pdkl95 9y ago
While a good standard library would help, the fundamental problem (undecidability) still exists. You could build a system that is understandable if you only use calls into a (presumably proven/tested to be safe) standard library. At that point it would de facto be a declarative language, which is decidable iff the grammar is not Turing complete[1]. It's limiting, but you can still have many of the fancier features by baking standard versions of them into the language/stdlib itself. > I believe people in the space are cognizant of them and are working on solutions. The problem with that is that this isn't a bug or engineering problem that we can solve with impossibly talented devs and a sufficiently large r&d budget. Questions about any non-trivial semantic behavior of a program (such as, "will the program halt"[2]) are known[3] too be undecidable[4]. [1] according to LangSec, the grammar needs to be deterministic context-free (or simpler). Anything more complex is undecidable. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem

pdkl95 9y ago

While a good standard library would help, the fundamental problem (undecidability) still exists. You could build a system that is understandable if you only use calls into a (presumably proven/tested to be safe) standard library. At that point it would de facto be a declarative language, which is decidable iff the grammar is not Turing complete[1]. It's limiting, but you can still have many of the fancier features by baking standard versions of them into the language/stdlib itself. > I believe people in the space are cognizant of them and are working on solutions. The problem with that is that this isn't a bug or engineering problem that we can solve with impossibly talented devs and a sufficiently large r&d budget. Questions about any non-trivial semantic behavior of a program (such as, "will the program halt"[2]) are known[3] too be undecidable[4]. [1] according to LangSec, the grammar needs to be deterministic context-free (or simpler). Anything more complex is undecidable. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem