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> A program that can't express H (72 in decimal) in Hello world is about as divorced from practicals as you can get

Huh? I was giving an example of how we make undecidable properties trivial in languages. It can be any property. It's easy to see that Rust does the same with memory safety, i.e. through an inductive invariant, because every statement in Rust maintains the invariant.

> Yes, but it relies very little on human verification.

Of course. It shouldn't rely on human verification at all. That's how we design type systems. But because an inductive invariant is inherently conservative and must reject correct programs, there is additional human effort required -- not to verify the property, but to stay within the confines of the inductive invariant. In Rust terms, the compiler takes care of memory safety, but you need to put an effort into expressing memory-safe programs in Rust to fit within Rust's constraints, which are, necessarily more restrictive than memory safety (because they must use an inductive invariant).

> And I'm saying it as a programmer field we should monotonically approach the ideal by removing languages that don't support it.

And I'm saying that what we've learnt over the past five decades is that more soundness does not necessarily mean getting closer to the ideal. Sometimes more soundness gets us further away from the ideal.

> Also seatbelts are sometimes worse, doesn't mean we shoud abolish them for seatbelts-less Pintos.

No one is suggesting that, it's just that what you're referring to as seatbelts could sometimes do more harm than good even for safety. We have empirical evidence that real seatbelts increase safety; things are nowhere near as clear for language soundness.

Sure, C is so exceptionally weak that we can do better than that, and there's no doubt Rust is better on correctness than C, but that's not the same as saying Rust is better on correctness than any language that makes fewer guarantees than Rust. Why? Because, again, we've seen that the benefits of soundness are not linear -- they help until they start hurting. Knowing where that point is is not easy.

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