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.
Read more about this topic: Stack Overflow
Famous quotes containing the words deep and/or infinite:
“They turn’d to rest; and, each clasp’d by an arm,
Yielded to the deep twilight’s purple charm.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)