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This reminds me of Godel's incompleteness theorem - which I'll poorly present as: Any system that is sufficiently complex and complete will contain legal assertions that will disprove or destroy the system. (Those that do not are not complete).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_the... http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/...




Neither throwing an exception nor having a perfectly-deterministic buggy behavior is what Godel was referring to. This shouldn't remind you of anything related to the incompleteness theorem, because it's completely unrelated.


Not completely unrelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering but what he/she was talking about is unrelated.


I don't want to be condescending, but that isn't what the theorem says. (I'm not even sure it's true.) Incompleteness means there is a true statement, that cannot be proved true inside the system.


And the contrapositive is that any sufficiently complex complete system is inconsistent.


Oh man, brokentone was right this whole time. Sorry brokentone!


I'm only able to flirt with the edges of understanding this deep philosophy/math, so I can see correlations, but not defend them


> ... will contain legal assertions...

Well, the comments state that to make this happen he had to "[exploit] a bug in the UTF-7 decoder". So, not legal assertions.


It parses, thus it is legal.




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