[X4U] ICAL looping

[Ed Gould]

On Apr 22, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Daly Jessup wrote:

> Ed Gould wrote:
>
>> Today while I was away ICAL went into a loop. Nothing was going on  
>> except for these 2 things. I have a friend who subscribes to .MAC  
>> and I have one of his calendars in ICAL and he updated it (which  
>> should tell my ICAL to fetch the updated calendar) . The other  
>> item was that there was an appointment reminder that occurred at  
>> around and I never dismissed it.
>>
>> I didn't know it was looping until 9PM tonight. I had to force quit
>> it. Has anyone else experienced this?
>
> What was it doing? I don't understand what you mean when you say  
> iCal was "looping." Can you describe it?
>
> Daly
> ----------------------
>
Daly,

Sorry at work everyday we use the term to indicate a logic error in  
the program and it starts to loop internally (i.e. branches to itself  
infinitely) programmers aren't the best in the world and sometimes it  
happens. The symptom shows it self as the program never ends it just  
sits there eating up CPU time and not producing either any output or  
not displaying anything on the screen. an extremely simplistic  
example is this bit of code:
process: If input not equal to blanks  go to process ,the program  
will test for a field equal to blanks and if it is not it will go to  
a  place in the code called process essentially an endless loop  
because the "input" will never change and will *NEVER* be equal to  
blanks. This is an extremely simply example of a loop in programming  
I have seen some code that spans megabytes . Sometimes it is easy to  
find sometimes not. I have seen some really strange loops in my 30  
years professional life example one that only hit a program is it was  
run before 2PM in the afternoon and after 130 PM. Otherwise it ran  
perfectly well. The programmer never did find the code bug and had to  
come in for help. I looked at the code and didn't see anything  
obvious and we put displays in where it could be happening and didn't  
hit the problem after doing some rather intensive bug finding we  
found it almost by mistake.

Ed