[mjevans]

I didn't understand what you were talking about offhand and thought range might be the value of the stored/searched data, not a pointer arithmetic issue.

When the array/list consumes a memory footprint larger than ptrdiff_t it was possible that the specific implementations might fail. It is crucial to remember that the difference between memory address is signed and that the size of objects (even if bare machine integers of some size) in the set might be displayed as a number smaller than one of the powers of two many recall.

On a 32 bit machine this wouldn't be approx 2 billion but rather often 500M 32 bit words or 250M-ish 'double' precision numbers. Let alone if the search is over more complex structures representing objects. For a smaller 16-bit embedded system I could even more readily see this occurring.

[luc4sdreyer]

You make a good point. I was actually speaking about the general case, where you're simply pulling the bounds of x_min and x_max closer until f(x) reaches a target value or the bounds converge to the same value. f could be an array and x could be an index, but it doesn't have to be. The bug still exists in this general case. All you need is a numerical datatype that can overflow, and most of them can.