I am going to defend myself. Then, I am going blow my argument out of the water.<p>Backstory: I am a fifth year comp sci student. I have worked part-time as an SDE for most of my college career. The python crash I referenced earlier was in class, the java problem at work. I have written an optimizing compiler before (C subset to LLVM to SPARC MIPS), so I hope that you will at least agree that I am not a complete moron in this area.<p>Java story, more detail: To make a really long story short: I wanted to move a really really long stored procedure (~2k LOC) into a JDBC query. Don't ask why, it was a very scary legacy issue. So I copy and paste the stored procedure into one long const string in eclipse, and it compiles just fine. I run our ant script against it, and it explodes with a stack overflow (IIRC). The solution that I found was simply to replace newlines with \n" + (newline). No stack overflow on compilation anymore. From this I could only assume that I had fubared the compiler (which would have been a reasonable way to fubar, being as I was trying to create an absolutely massive const string directly).<p>Now we could quibble over whether this even counts as a crash in the sense we were talking about, but the underlying premise is: you never want to have to work around your tools. As computer scientists we do it a lot, but it is never fun and its worse when something goes down in production because the tool crapped out. Theoretically, a VM or OS should never fail and bring the entire system down. A compiler should never outright crash.<p>Now to debunk my own defense: I just sat down for about an hour and did everything I could to reproduce the bug in JDK 1.5.6 (the original JDK I broke it on). Well, go figure, I can't get it to break in the hypothetical way I wanted to. I might one day do exactly what I did with the stored procedure, but setting that <i>particular</i> environment up again would take quite some time.<p>In conclusion, you can assume I was an idiot because I can't show you the code. I would in your shoes. :)<p>P.S. This all assumes you are using tools given to you by the platform itself. Using JNI to dereference a NULL doesn't count. :D