Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!kth!draken!tut!tukki!tarvaine
From: tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Strange... The Turbo Pascal NEW command
Message-ID: <1087@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 3 Aug 89 12:16:03 GMT
References: <845@dutrun.UUCP> <3.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us>
Reply-To: tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 16

In article <3.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us> filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin) writes:

>  (I don't think there's an exception routine for
>Dispose -- how could it fail?)

Yes it can, rare though it is:  There is a fixed size reserved
for the free space list, and if you free a block that isn't adjacent
to another, you need room for another entry.  If memory becomes
sufficiently fragmented, it is possible to fill the list.
This is described on p. 197-198 in TP 5.0 Reference Guide;
it says there is room for 8191 noncontiguous freed blocks.
BTW, it isn't quite as unlikely as the manual suggests:
it happened to me once!  

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen    (tarvaine@jyu.fi, tarvainen@finjyu.bitnet)