Re: [PATCH] Removed arbitrary limitations on array accesses

[Duncan Sinclair <duncan.sinclair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5 Jan 2010, at 9:48 am, Peter Stephenson wrote:

> On Mon,  4 Jan 2010 20:38:17 -0500
> Michael Hwang <michael.a.hwang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > This issue was brought up on IRC. It appears that while there is no  
> > limit on
> > how many array elements can be stored, there is a limit to how many  
> > can be
> > accessed. This patch removes these limits.
>
> Those have been there for a long time.  I don't have any evidence that
> they're doing a lot of good but we have had people creating positional
> parameters with <long_number>=something and wondering why it uses a  
> lot of
> memory.  I suppose this is similar.  The arbitrary limit is not very
> useful and also undocumented; most people wouldn't miss it if it  
> wasn't
> there, certainly.

IIRC, the problem was that is you typed a big number at the zsh prompt  
and hit tab, the shell would either hang for a long time or crash (out  
of memory).

% 99999999999<tab>

I reported this as a bug – the shell should not crash so easily.

There is probably a way of preventing this problem though without  
putting arbitrary limits on the size of array indices.


--
Duncan Sinclair  |  {+44|0}141 548 3592  |  cis.strath.ac.uk
System Administrator
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