Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> My programs aren't arbitrary. They have some kind of structure to them. 
> Other people's programs do not necessarily have this property.

So, everyone else is a *worse* programmer than you? And they write random 
programs with no purpose? ;-)

Here's the deal that Turing figured out. You can't take every *arbitrary* 
program, i.e., one created by generating a bunch of machine code 
instructions with a random number generator, and figure out what it's going 
to do without running it. But that's not how people write programs.

You also can't check that a program is typesafe, because you can't tell if 
an arbitrary program every assigns the wrong type to a variable. But we 
design strongly-typed programming languages that disallow well-typed 
programs that the compiler can't prove are well-typed.

Since people don't debug arbitrary random programs, it's usually (usually!) 
fairly easy to figure out, when you get an error message, what caused it. 
Certainly easier than when you get no error message and just the wrong answers.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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