[PD] What exactly is a "stack overflow" ?

[Russell Bryant]

Frank Barknecht wrote:
> If people want to make sure to not be bitten by the endless loop, they
> could just use 
> 
>   [inlet]
>   |
>   [b]
>   |
>   [f 1000000000000]
>   |     [inlet]
>   |     |
>   [until]
>   |
>   [outlet]
> 
> as an abstraction called: [funtil] It will bang 1000000000000 times
> unless stopped, which is more bangs for the bang than most people
> would want.

It doesn't look like that would work.  The number of times to run is stored as
an int, which on most systems is 4-bytes.  The maximum is a bit over 2 billion
for a float input.  :)

Also, from looking at the implementation of [until], a simple bang until will
stop after a complete overflow over the storage space in an integer, which is
usually 4 billion and change.

(x_count is an int.)

static void until_bang(t_until *x)
{
    x->x_run = 1;
    x->x_count = -1;
    while (x->x_run && x->x_count)
        x->x_count--, outlet_bang(x->x_obj.ob_outlet);
}

--
Russell Bryant