Infinite recursion in S3 methods crashes R on windows (related to PR#8203?)

Rich FitzJohn <rich.fitzjohn at gmail.com> writes:
Hi,

Infinite recursion in S3 methods seem to crash R on Windows 2000 (R
terminating with the ("Rgui.exe has generated errors...") message,
rather than throwing an error.  This happens with both Rgui and Rterm.

The following toy example triggers this:
myf <- function(x, ...)
  UseMethod("myf")

myf.default <- function(x, ...)
  myf(x)

myf(1)
...R crashes...

Which I would expect to terminate with the usual "evaluation nested
too deeply: infinite recursion" or protect stack overflow message.

This may be related to the reported bug 8203 - apologies if this has
been fixed.  I couldn't find specific mention of this in the NEWS
file.

This does not happen on R 2.1.0 on Windows 2000 (same machine), or on
R 2.2.0 on Linux.  R/Machine version below.
This is presumably an issue of C stack size. We increased
options("expressions") in 2.2.0 from 500 to 5000, thinking that
"machines are bigger than that these days", but apparently not.

So for 2.2.0 patched we have

    o   options("expressions") has been reduced to 1000: the limit
        of 5000 introduced in 2.1.0 was liable to give crashes from C
        stack overflow.

and in R-devel

    o   options(expressions) reverts to the default of 5000 now
        stack checking is in place.
Cheers,
Rich

Version:
platform = i386-pc-mingw32
arch = i386
os = mingw32
system = i386, mingw32
status =
major = 2
minor = 2.0
year = 2005
month = 10
day = 06
svn rev = 35749
language = R

Windows 2000 Professional (build 2195) Service Pack 4.0

Locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_New Zealand.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_New
Zealand.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_New
Zealand.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_New Zealand.1252

Search Path:
.GlobalEnv, package:methods, package:stats, package:graphics,
package:grDevices, package:utils, package:datasets, Autoloads,
package:base

--
Rich FitzJohn
rich.fitzjohn <at> gmail.com   |    http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/richa183
                      You are in a maze of twisty little functions, all alike

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Infinite recursion in S3 methods crashes R on windows (related to PR#8203?)

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