This bug can manifest itself for arrays whose length (in elements) is 2^30 or greater (roughly a billion elements). This was inconceivable back in the '80s, when Programming Pearls was written, but it is common these days at Google and other places.
If you're using a 32-bit system, which has only 2^32 bytes in its address space, of which half is typically taken up by the OS kernel, leaving 2^31 bytes for your process, you can see just how strange this is; you would only be able to have an element size of 1 byte, for 2 would fill up the whole 2^31 bytes of address space and leave no room at all for code, and the memory manager would need to let you allocate a whole 1GB block --- and that's not even considering why you would ever want to binary search an array that large at once.
Of course, to use a 32-bit element count on a 64-bit system is itself a more valid bug, but otherwise the "bug" would appear at 2^63 elements --- clearly well beyond the capacities of computers today (x86-64 has only 48 bits virtual address space), or for that matter the size of anything which would be practically binary searchable.
Thus IMHO this is really more of a curiosity along the lines of "you'll run out of memory if you try to ask for too much", and you're probably doing something either exotic or just plain wrong if you need to fill up the machine's address space with a single data structure.