During an exercise at university this afternoon:

% sqlplus
sqlplus> set linesize 200
sqlplus> desc table_from_dictionary
Segmentation fault.

If you set linesize > 100, it segfaults.

It seems that my teacher known this but had no explication.

After some search I found:
This is the bug #842965 in version 8.1.5 and has been fixed in 8.1.6. In 8.1.5, you will get the coredump whenever the linesize is set to greater than 132.

So I can conclude that my teacher does not know how to use Google. Awesome.