Just fooling around some, I ran this

irb(main):001:0> 1020939**28329282

obviously nothing good can come of this, but Ruby promptly grabbed some resources and began trying to compute this, finally ruby had 100% of the cpu and was still chugging.  Needless to say, I killed it soon after.

I then tried this:
$ perl -e 'print 1020939**28329282, "\n"'
Infinity

I then tried it in gcalc:
e

Of course, python raises an "OverflowError", I don't have NumPy.

So I'm curious why ruby seems to have no limit on the stupidity of the user ;).  Perl is known to hand the user a good (tree_branch_height - (user_height + 1)) worth of rope, but still recognizes that this is a fruitless pursuit.
Mike Wilson
Unix Administrator
http://ruby.weblogs.com
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