From: Bob Hutchison <hutch@...>
Date: 2006-04-19T05:10:07+09:00
Subject: Very Strange Error(s)

Hi,

I've been encountering strange behaviour with Ruby recently. I'm  
wondering if anybody has seen anything like this before or if anyone  
has any ideas.

Here's what's happening:

- something that should be a String turns out to be an Integer
- if I run the same method call again, say by using a begin...rescue  
in a loop, and I loop a few times it eventually works with identical  
input -- if I do run it again, and if an error occurs again, it is  
usually in a different place
- long running Ruby process (actually Rails running webrick in  
development mode) -- I *think* I've never seen this in a short  
running process
- the frequency of the error does not seem to increase (so once it  
happens it does not start happening all the time, the system seems to  
be behaving properly)
- error happens during a request by the user.
- error normally quite deep in an execution stack
- ruby 1.8.4 (2006-03-28) [powerpc-darwin8.5.0]  -- that's OS X
- I've had this happen in XML parsers (REXML and xampl-pp), in  
rubyful soup, and in some code that simply prints a tree of objects
- I cannot reproduce it reliably

The going away on second or third try is particularly strange.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Bob

----
Bob Hutchison                  -- blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/ 
hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc.          -- <http://www.recursive.ca/>
Raconteur                      -- <http://www.raconteur.info/>
xampl for Ruby                 -- <http://rubyforge.org/projects/xampl/>