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The thing about the halting problem, though, is that it doesn't say "You can't write a program that can determine if another program will terminate". It says "Y
by buff-a 15y ago
The thing about the halting problem, though, is that it doesn't say "You can't write a program that can determine if another program will terminate". It says "You can't write a program that can determine if any other program will terminate."
Case in point: Resharper will tell me "This function never returns" in cases where it obviously wont return, and also offer to simplify methods that only ever return a single value despite what looks like a complex set of if-statements.
So, if it is possible to write a program to determine if a specific subset of all possible programs will terminate, is it possible to write a program that can generate a subset of all possible programs from a specific subset of all possible specifications?
I can't be perfect. But might it be useful?
- jng 15y agoThis! That's why the halting problem is not an issue. Yes, it's impossible to solve in the general case. It doesn't mean it's definitely possible to solve it in 99% of your everyday programming work. Isn't that valuable? Isn't that worth an attempt at getting there?