Adding Axioms to Minimize Insight

For open-ended loops, consider the following two programs that each print out the square of every number in an array  

Therefore, as a first pass to measure software complexity, the programmer can simply count the number of open-ended looping structures (either as loops or recursive functions) which occur in the program. 

Gregory Chaitin formalized this idea in his algorithmic information theory. He pointed out that while certain problems were unsolvable given a base set of axioms. 

Calculating Software Complexity Using the Halting Problem 

In the same way, when a convention for constraining repetition is discovered, it can be incorporated into a canon of axioms which are also known to halt. And thus it should be treated almost on the same level as a language construct which produces close-ended loops, because language constructs enforce the validity of the axiom structurally, while conventions require the programmer to manually follow the convention correctly. 

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