I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.
Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.
what if you could write a program that would tell you when the halting problem would be solved?
Oh, computer scientists already made one! Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, it can't predict the answer. But it will print "solved!" as soon as the answer is found! Here it is:
loop {}
println!("solved!");
There is! A lovely gentleman named Borges wrote about it once, but it's a resource hog, and it has a few UX issues that make it very impractical for general use.
ok ok ok but you can probably do static analysis to determine if some programs definitely halt, and other programs might or might not right?
we once talked to Edwin Brady, who wrote Idris, about a notion we had at the time that it matters whether the compiler terminates. he said in practice if it doesn't, the programmer will hit ^C and everything will be fine. we're convinced he was right, at least for that scenario.