Re: Halting Problem: What Constitutes Pathological Input

On 08/05/2025 06:33, olcott wrote:

On 5/8/2025 12:22 AM, Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 08/05/2025 06:12, olcott wrote:

It is like you never heard of infinite recursion.

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I'm sure he has.
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On a computer, there's no such thing.
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Oh, we can /describe/ such a thing:
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foo(){foo();}
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or, if you prefer:
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void bar(void);foo(){bar();}bar(){foo();}
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but it never gets more than a yard off the starting line before it breaks. On systems where function calls are facilitated by pushing return addresses onto a stack, the stack rapidly runs out of space, and a good OS will trip it up before Bad Things can happen.
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If you think you have "an essentially infinite recursion relationship" you're only fooling yourself, nobody else.
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 We are testing the basic elements of key algorithms
in the concrete model of computation of the x86 language,
we have no need to look at memory requirements. The C
functions are proxies for Turing Machines.

That doesn't answer the point, which is that no physical computer --- least of all the x86 --- supports infinite recursion.

I hate tedious details.

It shows. What you need is a 6" brush, a few tins of white paint, and a barn. Leave the programming and the logic to people who know how important the tedious details are.

I specific the gist of ideas
so that the rest can be easily inferred.

I can easily infer that you don't know anywhere near as much about computers as you like to imagine.
The people you habitually attack - Mike Terry, Keith Thompson and Richard Damon, to name but three - positively ooze expertise, but all you seep is slapdash code and slapdash logic.
Do yourself a favour. Leave the tedious details to experts.
--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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