Fall of Roman Empire

[Chris Mellon]

On 12/20/06, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> "John Machin" <sjmachin at lexicon.net> writes:
>
> > Ben Finney wrote:
> >
> > >  \      "...one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was |
> > >   `\        that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful |
> > > _o__)               termination of their C programs."  -- Robert Firth |
> >
> > An amusing .sig, but it doesn't address the root cause: As they had no
> > way of testing for the end of a string, in many cases successful
> > termination of their C programs would have been unlikely.
>
> Yet historically proven: the 'imperium' process they were running
> terminated many centuries ago.
>
> Or did it fork and exec a different process?
>

According to the C standard (16AD version), access past the end of an
imperial era results in undefined behavior.