Talk:Halt and catch fire

A bit limited ?

Is this task to be taken literally - halt the CPU - and thus only be applicable to the handful of assembly languages with samples already provided ?
Or does it mean "crash the program" by e.g. dividing by zero or asserting a false condition or raising an unhandled exception or calling exit or...

Whilst reading about the fictitios HCF instruction was entertaining, do we want to encourage people to crash their CPUs ?

--Tigerofdarkness (talk) 21:02, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

I didn't see that the task was to   halt the CPU,   but to   crash the (computer) program.     -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 21:09, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Gerard. What does your impressively minimal REXX program do ? --Tigerofdarkness (talk) 17:24, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

It "crashes" the REXX interpreter,   the messages can vary from REXX to REXX, but for Regina REXX,   the output shown to my terminal   (a Windows DOS "boxed" screen)   is:

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────09/15/2021 13:21:27
c:\►regina haltfire
Error 35 running "c:\haltfire.rex", line 1: Invalid expression
Error 35.1: Invalid expression detected at "="

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────09/15/2021 13:21:29
c:\►

 

      ---  where the 1st two lines are a DOS prompt   (actually, it is one DOS prompt line that is wrapped into two lines)   and
      ---  lines 3 and 4 are the actual (two) error messages from Regina REXX,   
      ---  followed by the DOS prompt   (again, it looks like two lines, but it is a single long DOS prompt that wraps.
      ---  A different REXX interpreter should/may produce similar error messages(s). 

I could've chosen some other character, but a lone equal sign seemed (to me) a very succinct way to "crash" a REXX interpreter without use some other "special" character.       -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 18:37, 15 September 2021 (UTC)