Thanks for the link, great read. I think I get you here; in the context of a DSL where it's impossible to travel more instructions than X, suddenly you don't have a halting problem anymore as you've artificially limited that language's ability to travel beyond a known/fixed set of states.

The second you wield a language which has constructs like Haskell, where in theory you can iterate over an infinite list of items (thinking about it even any language where for i in input_var is possible); the halting problem hits you in the face like a brick.

Its almost a chicken and the egg problem, where you can't know how long it will run for/whether it will halt without already knowing the answer, but if you knew the answer, you wouldn't need the program to find it.

My head is spinning.