From: mental@...
Date: 2005-11-03T00:41:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Weird irb experience

Quoting Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com>:

> So, I was hacking on Ruport at work tonight.
>
> And irb broke my heart:
> http://www.newhavenrubyists.org/blogs/tiberius/?p=6
>
> Anyone have an idea what the hell heart:0 is?

In the character set your DOS window is using, heart is 0x03.

I'm guessing you're seeing a pointer into random/uninitialized
memory (where the first two bytes happen to be 0x03 0x00) being
used for a filename in the backtrace somehow.  In C programs, such
things are usually signs of badness.  Could be a premature free(),
could be a garbage pointer, could be a missed initialization. 
Probably a Ruby bug.

0x01,

-mental