extremely large expressions fail to compile

[David Whysong]

I'm not on this mailing list, so please CC me with any replies.

I have a function that can not be compiled with gcc 2.7.2.3, egcs 1.0.3a,
or pgcc-2.90.29. The function consists of about 3000 lines of elementary
mathematics operations, mostly addition, subtraction, and multiplication
of doubles. There are only 24 statements in the function, and some of the
statements are very, very large.

Compiling the source produces a signal 11. At first I thought it must be
flaky memory, but I have reproduced this behavior on 5 different computers
which are known to have good and stable hardware. Furthermore, a compile
succeeds if I split the function into six separate source files, each with
one function of four statements. 

A quick look through K&R didn't turn up any explicit limits on expression
size. Even if there is some maximum permitted length, it would be better
to print an informative error message instead of segfaulting.

I can provide a .tgz file which demonstrates the problem (it's 30k -- not
as bad as it sounds).

Dave

David Whysong					    dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu
Astrophysics graduate student         University of California, Santa Barbara
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