🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan24.103924.1@hmcvax.claremont.edu>, dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu
writes:
|> In article <JOHN.93Jan19160650@sekrit.WPI.EDU>, john@sekrit.WPI.EDU
|> (John Stoffel) writes:
|>  
|> > I have a user at our site who it trying to latex his thesis.  He kept
|> > running out of space, so I increased the size of TeX and LaTeX by a
|> > fairly large amount, but it's still running out of space.  Here is the
|> > tail of the lo file:
|> 
|> > ! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [input stack size=15000].
|> 
|> This is an important enough question that it deserves an answer:
|> with the old [default] font selection scheme there is a design
|> choice that requires all font changes to be immediately closed in
|> braces: it's likely that the student's file has a lot of commands
|> like:
|>   \large ... \small ... \normalsize
|> rather than the preferred 
|>   {\large ...}{\small ...}
|> \boldmath can also cause this problem.
|> 
|> There's not enough information in your posting to tell for sure
|> that this is the problem, but every case of the stack size TeX
|> capacity exceeded message I have seen has been because of the
|> above problem.

I am afraid I don't believe it. This seems more likely to cause save
stack overflow than input stack overflow, if it causes any trouble at
all.

Input stack overflow, 999 times out of 1000 (at least), is caused by
indefinite recursion that will exhaust it however large you make it.
The canonical Plain TeX example is

    \def\recurse{\recurse\recurse}  \recurse

and there are of course many ways to do the equivalent in LaTeX with
\newcommand or \newenvironment, defining something in terms of itself
(possibly via other definitions). To diagnose the problem, you look
at TeX's backtrace in the error report (setting \errorcontextlines to
a large value if necessary so as not to miss anything). What is being
shown here *is* the input stack contents. With the above probability,
you will observe a simple repetitive structure in the stack entries.

Chris Thompson
Cambridge University Computing Service
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