> Now there is a problem in theoretical informatics known as the "halting
> problem": Given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input, decide 
> whether the
> program will ultimately finish, or instead run forever. In 1936, Alan 
> Turing
> proved that for the general case of a Turing-complete engine, this halting
> problem is *not* decidable - in other words, for each and every 
> Turing-complete
> programming language it is *impossible* to come up with a generic 
> algorithm that
> can predict from any given program and any given starting conditions 
> whether it
> will enter an infinite loop or not.

I'm not saying it's possible to detect whether any program will stop or not. 
I'm saying that in *some* cases you can relatively easily detect that it 
won't stop without changing the functionality.

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