What is halting?

Halting refers to the termination of a computational process or a computer program. It means that the program has reached its conclusion and stopped executing. A program can halt either because it has completed its intended task or because it encountered an error or exception that caused it to stop. The concept of halting is fundamental in computer science, particularly in the theory of computation. The famous Halting Problem, formulated by mathematician Alan Turing, asks whether there exists an algorithm that can determine if any given program will eventually halt or run indefinitely. This problem is unsolvable for general-purpose programs, which means that there is no automated way to guarantee that a program will stop executing.