> Did you have more specific questions in mind?
On stack overflow, my understanding was that could encounter that fatal condition from suddenly a too deep call stack, that is, too many calls without a return. So, if the "stack" is a, say, finite resource, then the programmer should know in the code how much of that resource is being used and act accordingly.
For a preprocessor for C++, I IIRC at one point the definition of C++ was in terms of a preprocessor -- I was just thinking of the definition, that is, get a more explicit definition of C++. I've always understood that always or nearly so C++ implementation was usual compilation. The issue is that at least at one time it seemed difficult to be precise about C++ semantics, that is, what the code would do and how it would do it. Maybe now C++ is beautifully documented.
