lkuper
JFP revisions: resolve the question about consistent termination
From reviewer 2's review:
It is rather unfortunate that the determinism result (Theorem 2.1) specifically does not address consistent termination (i.e., that if one run terminates with a non-error result, another run cannot diverge), but that this is only left as a conjecture. I think that, especially for an archival publication, the conjecture ought to be resolved (presumably positively), or there should at least be given a clear argument for why such a resolution would be a particularly hard undertaking, beyond the reasonable scope of the paper.
Note that the determinism theorem already establishes a very tight correspondence between different runs of a program: any two successfully terminated computations from the same starting configuration must yield stores that differ only by a permutation on the locations, and so in particular, the two runs must have performed equally many allocations. Since any program can be peppered with additional dummy allocations, this effectively means that all successful runs of a program perform the same number of basic operations, only perhaps in a different order. Given this, it seems particularly unlikely that one could construct a scenario in which one run terminates successfully after n transition steps, while another performs even n+1, let alone infinitely many, such steps.
