Pathological self-reference is like recursion with no recursion termination condition.Skepdick wrote: ↑Thu Jun 01, 2023 9:16 pmA cycle is another word for self-reference. Recursion (a.k.a induction) is built upon it.PeteOlcott wrote: ↑Thu Jun 01, 2023 9:03 pm A cycle is another word for pathological self-reference.
See my Clocksin & Mellish quote.
It's on you to explain which self-references are "pathological" and which aren't.
There's no problem with infinite structures either. Programming languages with lazy evaluation (e.g Haskell) handle infinite data structures all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluatio ... ll_by_need
Here's the (infinite) set of natural numbers being assigned to a variable in Haskell.
Code: Select all
λ> let n = [0..] n :: (Num a, Enum a) => [a]
When logic expressions have Pathological self-reference, they cannot be evaluated.