|
|
Posted by "Richard Lynch" on 01/19/06 00:23
On Wed, January 18, 2006 2:36 pm, Mark wrote:
> Here's a point of debate, should this sort of behavior be allowed?
Of course it should be allowed!
It's a standard computer science technique!
There are entire branches of mathematics / science devoted to
recursive graph theory.
Whole *BOOKS* written about it.
Go here and you'll find WAAAAAAY more info than you ever wanted to now:
http://info.com/cyclic+graph
:-)
> If
> it is
> allowable, how does one support it in any sort of serialized
> methodology?
The most common solution was already posted. I'm sure that there are
more in the textbooks.
If it helps any, Common Lisp routinely dumps out cyclic data
structures and reads them back in as text files.
Of course, in Common Lisp, all the data structures are considered fair
game for self-modification as source code, since source code and data
have the same internal structure, so that's not exactly the norm in
CS... :-)
> I
> have a few ideas but none very pretty. I'm pretty sure it causes
> problems
> in regular PHP as these sorts of pages sometimes have problems anyway.
The kind of problem a recursive mistake causes is usually pretty
obvious and easy to fix.
You spiral into an infinite loop and slam the CPU and your computer
turns into a door-stop until you kill that process.
It's pretty unlikely that the current remaining bugs in SquirrelMail
(which I use every day, btw) are caused by this, imho.
--
Like Music?
http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|