Detecting recursion loops

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2006-12-01, robert <no-spam at no-spam-no-spam.invalid> wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
>> robert <no-spam at no-spam-no-spam.invalid> writes:
>> 
>>> Carl Banks wrote:
>>>> 2. Consider whether you're unwittingly trying to cover up a bug.
>>>> ISTM no matter how problematic the input is, you should at least
>>>> be able to make progress on it.  Are you getting this error
>>>> because, say, you're not incrementing a counter somewhere, and
>>>> thus recalling a function with the same arguments again?
>>> the "bug" comes in from the I/O input.
>> 
>> If a program doesn't gracefully deal with bad input, that's a bug in
>> the program. You should be designing your input handler so that it
>> will do something helpful (even if that's to stop immediately with an
>> informative error message) in the event of bad input, rather than
>> allowing that bad data to send your program into an endless loop.
>
>
> Yet that detection is what the asked alg should do. Example:
> When a HTML-(content)-relaying sends you around in a circle
> through a complex handler chain.

Being in a cycle doesn't actually prove your program will never
halt for that particular input, does it?

-- 
Neil Cerutti
Customers who consider our waitresses uncivil ought to see the manager --sign
at New York restaurant