Re: Detecting endless recursion?

Lex Spoon <lex@cc.gatech.edu>
26 Feb 2004 01:06:59 -0500

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[27 earlier articles]
Re: Detecting endless recursion? joachim.durchholz@web.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2004-02-08)
Re: Detecting endless recursion? alexc@std.com (Alex Colvin) (2004-02-08)
Re: Detecting endless recursion? cymric73@hotmail.com (Maarten D. de Jong) (2004-02-08)
Re: Detecting endless recursion? kenrose@tfb.com (Ken Rose) (2004-02-12)
Re: Detecting endless recursion? witness@t-online.de (Uli Kusterer) (2004-02-13)
Re: Detecting endless recursion? joachim.durchholz@web.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2004-02-26)
Re: Detecting endless recursion? lex@cc.gatech.edu (Lex Spoon) (2004-02-26)
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From: Lex Spoon <lex@cc.gatech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 26 Feb 2004 01:06:59 -0500
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
References: 04-01-104 <bvjd1o$aho$1@tom.iecc.com> 04-02-084 04-02-135
Keywords: debug
Posted-Date: 26 Feb 2004 01:06:59 EST

Uli Kusterer <witness@t-online.de> writes:
> "Maarten D. de Jong" <cymric73@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> While I'm far from an expert in language and compiler design, I happen
>> to know that in the programs used to drive the text-oriented Multi
>> User Dungeon-games (a.k.a. MUDs) the VM makes use of a concept known
>> as an evaluation cost or 'eval cost' for short. Basically it is a
>> counter which is increased everytime a VM instruction is executed. If
>> the counter exceeds a given amount, an error is thrown and execution
>> is aborted.
>
> I can't quite comprehend how that works. When would that counter be
> reset? I can't really come up with a place to reset this counter that
> wouldn't catch lots of legitimate code. 300 000 loop iterations are well
> within the reasonable range for a general-purpose programming language
> for loops.


I think the idea is that 300,000 loop iterations is crazy when you are
talking about MUDdy computations like "the goblin steals a potion from
player A and places it in box B". MUD's are supposed to stay lively,
you know, and it would be a bummer if they start, say, running hefty
AI's within the main loop of the MUD.


"Why is everything slowing down? Oh no, some newbie is talking to the
goblin king again!"




-Lex

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