Very Deep or Infinite Recursion
The most common cause of stack overflow is excessively deep or infinite recursion. Languages like Scheme, which implement tail-call optimization, allow infinite recursion of a specific sort—tail recursion—to occur without stack overflow. This works because tail-recursion calls do not take up additional stack space.
An example of infinite recursion in C.
int foo { return foo; }The function foo, when it is invoked, continues to invoke itself, using additional space on the stack each time, until the stack overflows resulting in a segmentation fault.
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Famous quotes containing the words deep and/or infinite:
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)