Detect Unresponding/infinite loop in MEL scripts

[silenthell]

Somehow detect when a MEL script is not responding or jumping at the same location over and over and within a specified timeout display a popup window asking whether or not to abort the current script...

Currently when making a mistake in for or while loop conditions there is no choice but forcefully close Maya and lose the code in Maya script editor and other unsaved worked in the scene.

[FirespriteNate]

While an official Autodesk solution would be great I'm not sure how it could be implemented seeing as how it's a generic coding problem, nothing to do with MEL or Maya. Either way, I've come up with this workaround which I've been using since Maya 6.5 or so and it works beautifully... you just have to remember to put it into your loops 😉

http://www.naughtynathan.co.uk/?p=59

[jwlove]

I think python has something built into it that breaks out of the loop after getting to some obscenely high loop count... I could be wrong on that though - I just seem to remember a few times here and there where I accidentally made an infinite loop with python (usually a 'while' loop) and it broke out of it - I think it also printed out something about reaching some value and suspecting it to be an infinite loop...