Re: [Nasm-devel] Bug? Or Nasm-abuse?

[anonymous c. <nas...@us...>]

The original goal of the "interminable macro recursion"
message in expand_smacro() was to cope with a true
case of smacro recursion.

Here is a minimal (though meaningless) test case:

  %define hang h %+ a %+ n %+ g
  hang

The message also triggers for tlines with lots of tokens
because its code resides inside the tline loop.

Given sufficient memory and time, a lengthy tline tends
to complete just fine -- case in point: a test case with a
little over a million tokens completes instantaneously on
a modern system with a multi-GHz processor.

By contrast, true recursion will eat all memory and then
fail in e.g. nasm_malloc() -- and with lots of memory it is
going to take quite some time to get there. This is what
the message was meant for. Also, it was meant to be a
suppressible warning rather than an error, so that code
wouldn't be precluded from intentional recursion.