Dear David,
> I found that the following ditty which in earlier incarnations of my
> system just died almost immediately with a Segmentation Fault, will
> under current 2.4 Linux kernels under, say, RedHat's (null) beta,
> cause the machine to more or less freeze:
>
> tex '\def~{\if~}~'
My system (linux with 2.4.19 kernel) get slower, but tex is stopped with
! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=2500001].
after a few seconds.
> That's bad. So perhaps one should let TeX automatically set a stack
> size limit, roughly what
> ulimit -s 1024 or so would do.
There are always ways to do weired things and to bring the system down
unless you set up limits that make the system unusable. I don't think
that adding such a system dependency is worth the trouble. Anyway,
the maintainer of web2c should decide that (since I aim to follow him
as closely as possible), so I'll forward him your request.
Thomas
