From ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk  Fri Jul 26 16:29:19 2002
From: ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk (ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 17:29:19 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: plotting density(rnorm(1000)) crashed once (PR#1837)
Message-ID: <200207261529.RAA25162@pubhealth.ku.dk>

How can a random result be reproducible?  You could have told us the seed
in use!   I've tried this ten times without a crash, on two separate
machines, one XP and one 2000.

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 Mike.Prager@noaa.gov wrote:

> I am experiencing a reproducible crash from the following statement:
>
> plot(density(rnorm(1000)))
>
> on R 1.5.1 on Windows 2000.
>
> This is a dual-processor machine with 512Mb of RAM.  Please advise if
> further details of hardware/OS are needed.
>
> If rgui.exe is in use, the crash occurs before the plot can be
> displayed.  If rterm.exe is in use, the plot appears, then the error (and
> crash).
>
> A screen capture of the error dialog box  can be viewed/downloaded at
>
> http://shrimp.ccfhrb.noaa.gov/~mprager/rcrash.png
>
> I happen to have Compaq Fortran installed, and therefore a debugger appears
> after the crash.  As I know nothing about systems programming, the debugger
> information (assembler) is meaningless to me, but if it would be useful, I
> can reproduce the crash, save the debugger information, and send it along.

There is advice on how to do this in a usable way in the rw-FAQ.

> This seems similar to crashes experienced in S-Plus that have been
> attributed to that program's assuming certain behavior on illegal math
> operations, behavior reportedly reset by HP printer drivers.  I do have an
> HP printer installed (hardly avoidable in the PC world).  But that
> observation may be totally irrelevant.

R is already well-protected against that HP bug (which does not occur on
WIndows 2000 BTW, and was discovered by me under Win98), and I do have an
HP printer installed.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



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plotting density(rnorm(1000)) crashed once (PR#1837)
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk