On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Peter Simons
I beg your pardon? I didn't say anything about "32M". I said that designing software to rely on a GHC-enforced memory limit as a means of "dealing" with infinite loops feels really not like a particularly good solution.
Sorry about that. I think the previous responder was asserting the 32M limit, not you. The program I wrote analyzes cryptographic protocols. It is theoretically impossible to decide if there is a finite number of answers to every protocol question that can be posed within our framework. Thus, I cannot guarantee termination. What I can and do, is allow users to set a step count bound, after which the program aborts. But guess what users do. They keep increasing the step count bound to see if just a few more steps will allow termination on their problem. Of course, some end up setting the bound so high, that thrashing occurs. So for implementations of undecidable algorithms, you really need an intelligent memory bound on the GHC runtime. John