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.NET Brain Droppings

I'm a Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA)... Feel free to ask me about the program...

Avoiding Stack Overflow

Charles has a hilarious post on his weblog about his internal stack overflowing when assigned more than 2 tasks.  Upon the arrival of the 3rd task, he experiences a stack overflow... 

Near the end of the day, the boss walked up to my desk and asked me how a third task (that had neatly slipped my mind) was progressing. What I experienced could only be described as a stack overflow. The attempt to add the third task to my stack caused the whole mess to fall over, leaving me babbling like an idiot for a few seconds while I tried to reconstruct enough state to allow me to provide an intelligent response.

Funny Stuff!  Turns out since my move to the Architecture Team a couple months ago, I've had to up my stack frame size to about 6 before my brain turns to mush... Unfortunately, a stack frame of this size means my productivity as a developer has hit an all time low!

[Listening to: Acumen Nation - Liquid Hater]

Phil: thanks for letting me know I forgot to link Charles' blog.  I guess I was in the middle of a context switch when I posted this item =)

Comments

 

Phil Weber said:


Don: Who is "Charles?" May we have a link to the item in question? Thanks! ;-)
July 21, 2003 2:34 PM
 

Duncan said:

The book "How the mind works" (Stephen Pinker?) has an argument that the brain has seven 'registers' and that any task that requires you to keep more than seven things in mind at once suffers from the human equivalent of context switch thrashing. Unfortunately the article itself is so complicated that unless you approach it with a completely clear mind you will end up with a "blank face of death" expression ;-)
August 25, 2003 11:11 AM

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