@zzt it's possible to meaningfully extend the idea if you can codify input complexity and progress towards a solution. in many cases this is extremely difficult. i spent two years on what should have been a phd thesis for a parser compiler which achieves this for undecidable grammars.

it took me almost a whole year to determine what was happening which is that it reduces undecidability to a certain compile-time-recognizable graph module and then consequently enables computational limits to be enforced upon just that section—or, the grammar writer can rewrite the grammar in an attempt to avoid this. this is vaguely similar to shift-reduce conflicts in abstract except that it's much less likely and is linked to features of the grammar that the writer can understand.

anyway nobody has ever done anything like it as far as i can tell and hacker news would instead just decide to stop computing based upon overall parser iterations because they're really not very good at manipulating and generating novel formalisms