Zsh Mailing List Archive
Messages sorted by: Reverse Date, Date, Thread, Author

Re: [PATCH] Removed arbitrary limitations on array accesses




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
Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde
The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SC015263.






Messages sorted by: Reverse Date, Date, Thread, Author