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Misha comments on No coinductive datatype of integers - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: cousin_it 04 May 2011 04:37PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 04 May 2011 06:52:26PM *  3 points [-]

Granted. But even so, the primary problem is that the input is infinite: we can deal with any finite input stream, no problem.

ETA: Also, the obvious way to approach the problem is to have a terminator character (this is how the unary representation works, for instance). In that case, what this result says is "if your decoder expects a terminator, then if you feed it an infinite string without a terminator, it'll get stuck." This seems obvious.