Well if "famous" loops that we're not writing ourselves are being mentioned (eg. Duff's Device) then how could I not mention the loop written by Mel Kaye on the RPC-4000?
For those not familiar with the story, see: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html Kaye wrote a loop that had no termination condition, yet it terminated just fine. He'd taken advantage of the fact that the address and opcode were both part of the instruction word. His loop executed an instruction that operated on data pointed to by the address operand, then incremented the address before looping back to execute the same instruction again on the new data location. The data had been placed at the top of memory, so the address would overflow when he did his final increment. The overflow incremented the opcode, changing it to a "jump". Since the address operand had just overflowed, it was now set to 0, and the process jumped to address 0 where it continued execution. (This was obviously before page guards) :-) I'd love to write something that could challenge this piece of insane genius, but modern languages tend to protect us from ourselves. It's not impossible to see crazy stuff like this, but it's much rarer. Paul Gearon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
