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In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 05 Nov 1999 09:16:35 EST."             
<199911051416.JAA24937@python.org>
References: <199911051416.JAA24937@python.org>

 > Don't know if this is considered a bug:
 > Python.exe crashed when I tried to use a recursive function,
 > like the infamous factorial.
 > I've downloaded and tried this on both Python 1.5.1 and 1.5.2
 > of the Windows 95/98/NT version.
 >
 > The function is as follows
 >
 > def fact(n):
 > 	if n==1: return 1
 > 	else: return n*fact(n)
 >
 > fact(1) returned 1 with no problems.
 > But fact(2) or any argument greater than 1 crashed python
 > with a Windows application error window popping up.
 >
 > I've run this before on a Linux version of Python without any problems.

Do you realize that your code has a bug?  It recurses infinitely
because you are calling fact(n) instead of fact(n-1).  On Linux, you
would have gotten a stack overflow error.

Unfortunately, the stack overflow code on Windows is broken (the limit
on recursion is too high, so it runs out of stack memory causing a
crash before the recursion limit is triggered).

Christian Tismer has posted a patch for the binary (python15.dll)
which solves this.  It has also of course been fixed in our source
code.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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