I actually thought that sounds like an elegant starting premise (on the part of Jian Wang). That is, instead of starting with the assumption that you can trans

I actually thought that sounds like an elegant starting premise (on the part of Jian Wang). That is, instead of starting with the assumption that you can translate it, start with the assumption that you can't (directly) translate it (and ask, "well then what can you do?") I believe a consequence of Rice's Theorem is that the quoted statement is more or less correct. However the technique of translating it to a simpler intermediate language, and moreover factoring out data as an explicit and separate stream, changes an intractable problem into a not-quite-intractable one. I'm pretty sure I've seen a pure-theory computer science paper, recently, which applies a similar technique on a completely different problem, but I can't remember where I saw it.