# Countability and Enumerability

I've sometimes conflated the ideas of a set being countable (a set $$S$$ is countable iff $$\exists I : \mathbb{N} \to S$$) and a set being enumerable (you can write a program that lists them). However, they are very distinct concepts. Here's an example, appealing to the widely-used proof in computability theory that Turing Machines (TMs) can not recognize if another arbitrary TM will halt on a specific input. Let's define a total ordering on TMs. Brainfuck programs are equivalent to TMs, so let's use that. Any lexicographic ordering on the program source will do. There is a least element (the empty string), and we can "increment" a TM under this ordering, as if it were a base-8 number (8 being the number of instructions in brainfuck). Thus, TMs are countable. Now, let's take the set of TMs that halt on all of their inputs, call it HTMs. Since HTMs is a subset of all TMs, HTMs is also countable. However, while you can list the TMs, you cannot list the HTMs! Why? Well, suppose we have an element of HTM. to find the next HTM, you would need to enumerate the TMs starting with that HTM and find the first that halts on all inputs. This would solve the halting problem, which is not possible. Put another way, countability is invariant under subset, but enumerability is not. So countability and enumerability are not the same. This isn't a new insight by any means, and there's a reason that the class of languages that TMs can recognize is called "recursively enumerable".