"has no way of knowing how much RAM the target machine will have"
That's why I phrased it in terms of a bound based on some characteristic of the problem.
But I was just asking for information. I know it's a well-known problem. To be honest the fact that we're even seriously discussing this as something that may be doable is a huge step forward. AIUI, previous state of the art on real languages would have this as hopelessly pie-in-the-sky.
I think in many cases memory bound is uninteresting; one could examine a vector implementation and be satisfied that it won't explode unnecessarily. After all, we do exactly that on non-proved implementations without too much fear all the time. SAT just came to mind as a problem where that could be an interesting thing to be able to prove.
That's why I phrased it in terms of a bound based on some characteristic of the problem.
But I was just asking for information. I know it's a well-known problem. To be honest the fact that we're even seriously discussing this as something that may be doable is a huge step forward. AIUI, previous state of the art on real languages would have this as hopelessly pie-in-the-sky.
I think in many cases memory bound is uninteresting; one could examine a vector implementation and be satisfied that it won't explode unnecessarily. After all, we do exactly that on non-proved implementations without too much fear all the time. SAT just came to mind as a problem where that could be an interesting thing to be able to prove.