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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.philosophy
Subject: Re: A halting problem
Message-ID: <1123@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 31-Jan-86 16:45:51 EST
Article-I.D.: mmintl.1123
Posted: Fri Jan 31 16:45:51 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 04:32:43 EST
References: <2175@aecom.UUCP> <14551@rochester.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Distribution: net
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 26
Xref: watmath net.ai:3256 net.philosophy:4075

In article <14830@rochester.UUCP> hari@rochester.UUCP (Narayanan Hari Narayanan) writes:
>Frank Adams writes in a recent posting:
>
>> Again, we have a semantic question.  I think most posters on this subject
>> are using "infinite loop" as a synonym for "non-terminating computation".
>
>"Infinite loop" is not a synonym
>for "non-terminating computation", but merely a special case of it.

Words mean what we want them to mean.  In some contexts, "infinite loop" is
a synonym for "non-terminating computation"; in others it represents only a
special case of it.  As long as the speaker and listeners both mean the same
thing by a word, there is no problem.  In this case, there is a problem; most
of the posters were using in the synonymous sense, but several responses
indicated that their posters were using it in a different sense.  Then I
posted this article, where I explicitly defined it in the sense of being a
subset of non-terminating computation, and Narayanan replies with an analysis
which would only make sense if I were using it as a synonym.

>> If by "infinite loop" you mean "repeats the same set of machine states",
>> then detecting infinite loops is like detecting halting.
>
>I don't think so. The general case of non-terminating computation [...]

Frank Adams                           ihpn4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Multimate International    52 Oakland Ave North    E. Hartford, CT 06108