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               Outbreak Magazine Issue #7 - Article 2 of 16
           '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'

Recursive Function Calls
========================
by Timeless
2002-06-10


One day I was messing around because I was bored and  thought  I'd  try  writing
some one-liner code in JavaScript. The first thing that came to me to try  was a
function that calls itself without any hope of breaking out of the sprial.

I simply placed the following in the address bar of Internet Explorer to run the
code and pressed Enter (some people like to use the "Go" button):

   javascript:function me(){me()}me();

Naturally, it ran out of stack space and presented  me  with  an  error  stating
the fact. This is perfectly acceptable behaviour.

Very well, so I tried a different approach. What if  I  made  the  function  add
characters to the web page (document body) recursively. Naturally I would either
expect to see a stack space error or an out of memory error  (whichever  happens
first). So here's my next one-liner:

   javascript:function w(){document.body.innerHTML+=' ';w()};w();
   
Well, shock, horror and disbelief... there was no stack nor memory error at all!
In fact, the browser just died on me! I had mixed results though and  needed  to
tweak the code a bit because in some cases it would only  crash  on  the  second
attempt. So I made it look like this (fit on one line please):

   javascript:function w(){document.body.innerHTML+=' ';w()};
      setTimeout('w()',100);w();

This new code would manage to run a second recursive call even after  the  first
one  had  died  (silently!).  This  time  it  killed  the  browser   much   more
consistently.

Notice that I am using "innerHTML", that's because "document.write"  behaved  as
it should - it reported an out of memory error. So basically, if  the  innerHTML
property can be overflowed... *insert your imagination here*


- Timeless

PS. Greetz to all at #hackerzlair and #outbreakzine and to  Radioactive_Raindeer
and splitfeed, and all my other friends - you know who you are.