Does anything bad happen if an array(list) contains itself?

Question

I noticed that if I do something like:

ArrayList anArray = new ArrayList();
anArray.add(anArray);

Netbeans auto-compiler doesn't seem to have any problem with it and I still seem to be able to reference everything. Are there any bad side effects of doing this?

Answer 1

I doubt anything bad would happen in most cases.

The problem would come if you were processing the list recursively in which case you'd end up with a stack overflow.