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From: dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: Increase run-time stack size
Message-ID: <1990Jul2.165001.15492@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 Jul 90 16:50:01 GMT
References: <32559@ut-emx.UUCP> <100010006@hpcupt1.HP.COM> <1990Jul2.011448.19220@Octopus.COM>
Organization: AIR, Stanford Universit
Lines: 22

In article <1990Jul2.011448.19220@Octopus.COM> stever@octopus.UUCP (Steve Resnick ) writes:
>In article <100010006@hpcupt1.HP.COM> swh@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Steve Harrold) writes:
>>Things that seem to go into the stack with Microsoft C programs include the
>>environment table (in some memory models); thus you might want to reduce
>>the number of superfluous variables in the DOS environment.
>>
>WHAT?????? The environment is in the data segment (as opposed to the stack
>segment which may be the same segment but is addressed with SS as opposed to
>DS). Changing the size of your environment should have no affect on running
>programs. Stricly speaking the environment is not part of DOS. It's part of
>COMMAND.COM and therefore should not affect the running of programs.

Not quite true - first, the environment IS managed by DOS and is not just a
feature of COMMAND.COM.  Second, since the environment is put in kind of an
inconvenient place (in another segment), some compilers make a copy of it
to make accessing it easier.  I know the Topspeed C compiler does this, and
I bet Microsoft does as well.  It might stick it in the stack (why?  I don't
know).  So, the size of the environment does matter.  I wouldn't expect to
get much mileage out of it, though - maybe 1K if it is really big?

 -David Hinds
  dhinds@popserver.stanford.edu