Programmer's conundrums

[Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Richard once stated:
> 
> 
> In article <Pine.SUN.4.20.0604031657110.3983-100000 at osfn.org>,
>     William Donzelli <aw288 at osfn.org>  writes:
> 
> > >   Either I'm not that smart, or in all my years as a programmer, I've never
> > > come across a linked list where part of it is in a loop, not all of it.
> > 
> > A "typical" application would be in a state machine, where the non-loop
> > bit at the head would be used for initialization.
> 
> Another example is a sequence that starts out nearly chaotic, but
> eventually settles into a period N attractor loop.  When you iterate
> orbits on the interior of the Mandelbrot set, many will have this
> characteristic.  They look chaotic initially, but are attracted to a
> periodic attractor inside M and become periodic.  There are also
> periodic attractors with arbitrarily large periods, so they may look
> "chaotic" to your finite buffer size :-).

  Yes, I've written code like that, but in those cases I've used arrays, not
linked lists (as the upper bounds for looping were set beyond which they
were considered "infinite").

  -spc (Not code to check the Mandelbrot system, but a chaotic system
	none-the-less, but under IRIX 4.0.1 (on topic) and a IBM PS/2
	model 80 with 8514 graphics card (also on topic))