Proposal for tag: [infinite-output]

Question

I recently created the infinite-output tag for my newest challenge. After a discussion in chat, there's a bit of disagreement on whether it's needed.

Here are some questions I think the tag would apply to:

• Shortest code to produce infinite output (For obvious reasons)
• Implement a truth machine (debatable because it only requires infinite output sometimes)
• Follow a linked list (the original question I added it to)
• High throughput Fizz Buzz (to demonstrate that many applicable questions don't simply include the text infinite or infinite output)

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

infinite-output is too specific

Such a tag would be covered by a more general tag, such as infinite-runtime* which would imply that answers to tagged challenges shouldn't ever stop running (ignoring minor complications such as the heat death of the universe etc.).

For example, answers to Loading... Forever arguably do not have an infinite output, yet the question says

Your program should be able to run indefinitely

Similar challenges such as Implement a Truth-Machine or Shortest infinite loop producing no output which would be edge cases (or not even covered) by infinite-output would fall under this tag, and, as far as I can tell, we don't have anything that already superseeds or covers this specific tag.

This is a (non-perfect) search for all 118 open, non-tips challenges that include the word "forever" in the spec. Obviously not all of these will be covered by this tag, but a substantial number would.

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* There's been some discussion in TNB for what this tag would be called. Feel free to comment suggestions that you think would be better

Answer 2

I think this is a useful tag

Here are my reasons for making the tag in the first place:

The purpose of tags is to make it easier to find (or ignore) questions involving a specific topic or type of task. The main argument against the tag that I received was that it wouldn't apply to more than maybe ten questions. I disagree.

There are quite a few questions involving infinite output that don't include infinite output, so trying to search for them conventionally won't work. This makes it seem like there are fewer applicable questions than there likely are (including the original question I tagged with it). It also gives the tag a good use, since finding related questions is difficult.

Infinite output is a much more common type of challenge than, say, box-256, and it's definitely possible that someone could be searching specifically for infinite output challenges. I see no downside to having the tag.