Re: forwarded message from Jeff Licquia
On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 04:38:03PM -0400, Boris Veytsman wrote:
> This is impossible due to a nice rendition of Goedel
> theorem. Basically it says that if your language is complex enough
> (well, if you can program a Turing machine in your language), then you
> cannot make a program that can in finite time automatically prove or
> disprove that a pair of programs gives identical results for all valid
> inputs. Since TeX the language is Turing-complete (note that TeX the
> engine is not, because it has limitation for the number of registers),
> you never can prove that two LaTeXs give identical output for all
> valid inputs.
Yes you can :) You can't write a program that can prove this in the
general case, but if you're creating a new LaTeX then you're not dealing
with the general case. It's quite easy to design the changes in such a
way that you can prove that the output will be identical.
Richard Braakman
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