POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Turing determination : Re: Turing determination Server Time
5 Sep 2024 19:28:00 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Turing determination  
From: Kevin Wampler
Date: 23 Jul 2009 15:04:22
Message: <4a68b436$1@news.povray.org>
Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Right. So if I write a pure function (i.e., some code that takes some 
> input and returns some output but does nothing else - aside from maybe 
> allocating memory), it is impossible to tell anything about this 
> function other than how long it's going to take and how much memory it's 
> going to eat?

It's slightly worse than that.  You can only *verify* a guess for the 
time/space consumption for each input you test.  It's always possible 
that the program could be entirely correct but exceed these bounds.  And 
really this is only possible through sort of a "cheat" -- there's not 
any interesting static analysis going on anywhere in this.

Doesn't mean static analysis can't be useful in practice though.


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