recursionlimit mystery!

[Bruce Pokras]

Update: this is bug report 15602. The response from the Livecode folks is that 7.0.x is using 16-bit numbers for the recursionlimit property, so Jacque hit the nail on the head. However, in 6.x.x they were using 32-bit numbers, so my setting a very high recursion limit actually did have an effect. They confirm that this is a bug. No promise on the timing of a fix, though.

> On Jul 14, 2015, at 2:57 PM, J. Landman Gay <jacque at hyperactivesw.com> wrote:
> 
> On 7/13/2015 9:23 PM, Bruce Pokras wrote:
>> The first time I opened the stack in 7.0.6 that had been developed
>> under 6.0.2 I received an error message related to the “openstack”
>> command in the stack script. It said that the value to which I had
>> set the recursionlimit property “is not a number.” The value I used
>> was 20000000. Looks like a number to me! (I am on a Mac, so the
>> Windows issue does not effect me). I tried various numbers until I
>> finally narrowed it down. Attempting to set the recursionlimit
>> property to any number greater than 65535 gives me an error that that
>> value is not a number. Also, setting the recursionlimit to a low
>> number like 40 does not work as expected. After setting the
>> recursionlimit property to 40 I typed “put the recursionlimit” into
>> the message box and hit “return.” The number that it returned was in
>> the high 30-thousands!
> 
> 
> I'm not sure about the 30,000 issue, but 65535 is the upper limit for a 16-bit number. It may be that earlier versions of LC just didn't throw any errors if you exceeded that.
> 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65535_(number)>
> "65535 occurs frequently in the field of computing because it is the highest number which can be represented by an unsigned 16-bit binary number. Some computer programming environments may have predefined constant values representing 65535, with names like MAX_UNSIGNED_SHORT."
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
> HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com
> 
> 
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