clipka wrote:

> BTW, it's not harddrive life that worries me in such situations, but the 
> bare struggle to get the system's attention back. Try killing a 
> swapping-mad program when it keeps thrashing the task manager out of 
> main memory... >_<

Heh. Fun... Actually, the one I usually have trouble with is Alt+Tab 
from a game back to the Windows desktop. Takes several lifetimes in both 
directions. No idea why.

One thing I discovered back at uni: If your Java program accidentally 
goes into an infinite loop, it dies almost instantly with a stack 
overflow. If your Smalltalk program accidentally loops forever, it's 
usually a few minutes before you realise that it's actually filling the 
entire VM address space with garbage. Now try stopping it. :-)

Literally, it's so determined to follow your instructions as efficiently 
as possible that for a while you don't even realise what's wrong. It 
just looks like it's "busy".

Of course, infinite loops are much, much more common in Smalltalk. A 
very common idiom is to write

#new
   super new.
   ...stuff...

But if, by some slip, you instead write

#new
   self new.
   ...stuff...

...then calling #new immediately calls #new, creating an endless 
allocation loop. o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message