3 ms·
Isn’t this basically a question about the halting problem? Whatever arbitrary cutoff you chose might not work for all.
by kulahan 2y ago
Isn’t this basically a question about the halting problem? Whatever arbitrary cutoff you chose might not work for all.
- kam 2y agoNo, compression formats are not Turing-complete. You control the code interpreting the compressed stream and allocating the memory, writing the output, etc. based on what it sees there and can simply choose to return an error after writing N bytes.
- eru 2y agoYes, and even if they were Turing complete, you could still run your Turing-machine-equivalent for n steps only before bailing.
- Rohansi 2y agoNot really. It's easy to abort after exceeding a number of uncompressed bytes or files written. The problem is the typical software for handling these files does not implement restrictions to prevent this.