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by tybug 1337 days ago
> But the same reasoning can be applied to any formal system F, with fairly minimal assumptions:

Strictly speaking, F has to be satisfiable/consistent as well. {P, ~P} is a trivially recursively enumerable, complete theory which contains Q.

1 comments

You get this for free in (2). You couldn't "reason about programs" if F were inconsistent, nor would the halting problem make any sense in an inconsistent system.
I would argue "reasoning about programs" formally means "can prove P Q R ..." (with appropriate choices for P Q R) and doesn't implicitly carry an assumption of consistency. But, fair enough.
You make a good point, and on the other hand you're right that "reasoning about programs" is not a term of art, so who knows what it means. Given how Lean is used in the article, I took it as basically being some kind of Turing-complete language (lambda-calculus or some variant or what-not).