There are some enumeration problems which have little input, except for some termination criterion. Examples for the question at hand would beenumeration of prime numbers in ascending orderenumeration of grid points by increasing distanceFor these there exist two fundamentally different techniques:With one class of approaches you have to state the scope of your question up front. You'd state the upper bound for the primes you want, the maximal distance, or similar. The Sieve of Eratosthenes would fall into this category, as would an algorithm enumerating all points in a rectangle and then sorting them by distance.With another class of approaches, you don't have to state the extent of the required output up front. You can see the enumeration as a lazily evaluated infinite sequence, and feed it to some other part of your code that should eventually terminate the generation once a generated output satisfies your requirements. Testing each odd number against a list of already found primes would be an example from this class.Now I'm looking for a term to distinguish these two forms. Somehow the latter approach feels closely related to online algorithms, which is why I added that tag. But every deifnition I could find specifies an online algorithm as processing its input incrementally. There is almost no input here, unless you count the one-bit decision between give me the next item and that's it, stop now as an incremental input. Would calling this an online algorithm be appropriate, or is there a better term?
Term for open-ended algorithms
algorithms;terminology;enumeration;online algorithms