Still, *undecidable *is an adjective. I want a noun.

-- Russ


On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 12:58 PM, glen e. p. ropella <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Thus spake Russ Abbott circa 09/07/2009 12:46 PM:
> > I'm missing the connection between *undecidable *and what I'm asking
> for.I
> > don't want a property of these things; I want a generic name for them.
>
> The point is that the validity of a statement (e.g. a program, down to
> the formal parameters in a method call) can be determined either by
> syntax or by execution.  In the extreme, if the language is fully typed,
> we can determine the validity of every sentence at compile time.  If
> it's fully dynamic, we have to actually execute each sentence in order
> to determine if it's a valid statement.
>
> Sentences in fully dynamic languages have to be executed in order to
> determine whether they're valid (i.e. all exceptions happen at runtime).
>
> It's not clear to me whether this is precisely the same as a sentence
> being decidable or undecidable; but the gist is very close.  In the most
> extreme, an undecidable sentence is proven undecidable if its effective
> computation will never halt, right?
>
> --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com
>
>
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