Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!ames!ucsd!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!willett!ForthNet
From: ForthNet@willett.UUCP (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Memory and PIC
Message-ID: <1083.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jun 90 23:08:20 GMT
Organization: Latest link in the ForthNet chain.  (Pgh, PA)
Lines: 31


 Date: 05-31-90 (17:27)              Number: 406 (Echo)
   To: ALL                           Refer#: NONE
 From: DAVID BREEDING                  Read: (N/A)
 Subj: DYNAMIC ALLOCATION            Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE

 Although I consider dynamic allocation to be one of the highest
 priorities in the new standard, I have yet to read ANYTHING about it.  I
 keep waiting for someone to bring it up, but somehow no one ever does,
 so I've finally gotten down to writing myself.
 All of the so called "modern" languages support some form of dynamic
 allocation within the language itself.  This memory can be called from
 fast ram, cache, or even disk.  All of this is transparent to the user. 
 One of the reasons I heard that colleges don't use Forth for teaching is
 that it leaves out this very thing.  I'm not saying that adding DA will
 make colleges and universities start teaching Forth, but I bet they'll
 sit up and notice.

 Now...how to implement it...

 First, let's keep it simple.  Two words, DALLOT and UNALLOT.  All this
 does is return an address of N items and then returns this address to a
 pool.  Most of the work in DA is easily accomplished using ram past
 HERE, and then feeding the memory back (keeping a linked list of
 deallocated memory chunks) to HERE after UNALLOT.

 Any specialized memory management could be handled by the individual
 system, only the standard words need to be there for the programers.
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