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Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Obviously it's not hard to imagine theor
by wizofaus 3y ago
Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Obviously it's not hard to imagine theoretical examples of a program so large nobody could figure it out within a human lifetime, but I'm not entirely convinced for real programs written by humans that checking for haltability is likely to be harder than checking for following coding standards (unless your coding standards consist purely of such narrowly and explicitly defined rules that it's 100% automatable).
Just because a single algorithm that works for all possible programs can't exist doesn't mean that it's necessarily difficult for any (or even most) actual programs humans might write.
- consilient 3y ago> Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Any interpreter for a Turing-complete language is an example.
- wizofaus 3y agoI guess I wasn't assuming you needed to determine if it would halt for any possible (but finite) input. But fair enough.