Detecting recursion loops

[robert]

Ben Finney wrote:
> robert <no-spam at no-spam-no-spam.invalid> writes:
> 
>> Carl Banks wrote:
>>> 2. Consider whether you're unwittingly trying to cover up a bug.
>>> ISTM no matter how problematic the input is, you should at least
>>> be able to make progress on it.  Are you getting this error
>>> because, say, you're not incrementing a counter somewhere, and
>>> thus recalling a function with the same arguments again?
>> the "bug" comes in from the I/O input.
> 
> If a program doesn't gracefully deal with bad input, that's a bug in
> the program. You should be designing your input handler so that it
> will do something helpful (even if that's to stop immediately with an
> informative error message) in the event of bad input, rather than
> allowing that bad data to send your program into an endless loop.


Yet that detection is what the asked alg should do. Example: When a HTML-(content)-relaying sends you around in a circle through a complex handler chain.

Robert