I was under the misapprehension that the input elements were guaranteed to be distinct. But seeing your reply I reread the OP and saw that was indeed not the case. Oops! In the absence of such a guarantee of course I agree with all your observations. Now, since my suggestion was in the first place more a stylistic one and not an algorithmic one, I'm interested in following up on how to code higher-level stuff that observes the running program and aborts and possibly switches attempted computations, how to do this with the minimum uglification of existing implementations, and reasonably efficiently.

Are there patterns here that you as language designer can see? For example, in a pure world, it's quite reasonable to say "fork off a thread with strategy #1, and give it $x seconds to run. If it fails emit the warning and move off to strategy #2". This is what you suggested except in a pure language what "fork off a thread" means under the hood kind of doesn't matter. It may be an OS thread, or something else -- you know the side effects are contained, and the computation can be killed at any time. Does it make sense to tag a function with "this should never take more than [some amount of CPU / RAM / other resource]"?

I also wonder if there's any commonality to expressing "tips" about the data, but I guess there isn't. (Like for example if here whoever gave us the data knew there were duplicates, but only very few, how would they express that.)

Sorry for rambling a bit, I should get some sleep...

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