Years ago, I was an applications programmer in San Francisco working on a timesharing language called EPS. The mainframes were all in Massachusetts. (Think dial-up terminals, mainframes, and 450 BAUD being considered fast.)
EPS, an interpreted language, was designed to let financial analysts run economic projections. It contained various kinds of arrays.
One day, the systems programmers announced a new feature, first released to the test mainframe: a new structure, called containers IIRC, with the twist being that any cell in a container could itself consist of a container.
You know where this is going:
For I = 1 to 100
ContX[1] = ContX
EndFOR
10 seconds later, EPS on the test mainframe had crashed. Coincidence? Hmmmmmm.
So far, my cover was my inquiring mind. But then I ran the loop again, with the same results.
A minute later, there was Massachusetts on the phone, in the person of my friend Kevin, lead EPS developer: "Hey, the answer is 47. What the hell are you doing?"
EPS, an interpreted language, was designed to let financial analysts run economic projections. It contained various kinds of arrays.
One day, the systems programmers announced a new feature, first released to the test mainframe: a new structure, called containers IIRC, with the twist being that any cell in a container could itself consist of a container.
You know where this is going:
10 seconds later, EPS on the test mainframe had crashed. Coincidence? Hmmmmmm.So far, my cover was my inquiring mind. But then I ran the loop again, with the same results.
A minute later, there was Massachusetts on the phone, in the person of my friend Kevin, lead EPS developer: "Hey, the answer is 47. What the hell are you doing?"