"Strong typing vs. strong testing"  Paul Rubin no.email at
nospam.invalid Thu Sep 30 22:21:45 CEST 2010  RG <rNOSPAMon at
flownet.com> writes: > There are only two possibilities: either
you have a finite-state  > machine, or you have a Turning
machine.  (Well, OK, you could have a  > pushdown automaton, but
there are no programming languages that model a  > PDA.  The
point is that the halting problem for general Turing machines is
undecidable, but there is a subset of the Turing machines, in
which the halting problem is decidable.  And it turns out that
the decidable subset is substantial enough to write almost every
program anyone usually wants to write in practice.  > Well, OK,
there's Forth, but AFAIK there are no static type  > checkers
for Forth.    but anyway, Forth is Turing-complete.  > If you
have a finite state machine everything is trivial.  If you have
a  > Turing machine everything is generally impossible.  This is
an  > oversimplification but not far from the fundamental
underlying truth.  I'm s