Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hplabsz!mayer
From: mayer@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Niels Mayer)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: can someone please explain the concept of "purification" in gnuemacs
Message-ID: <1258@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 25 Dec 87 04:26:54 GMT
Reply-To: mayer@hplabsz.UUCP (Niels Mayer)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Lines: 27

I've been playing around with putting some of the commonly loaded files in
gnuemacs into .../lisp/site-load.el and .../lisp/site-init.el, and at some
point had gnuemacs croak upon dumping. After some headscratching and
randomizing, I decided to up PURESIZE in config.h and recompile.

Now that it works, I want to know why:

1) What does PURESIZE represent? How does one determine a good value for
PURESIZE? 

2) What do "purify", "pure object", "sharable Lisp data", and "pure
storage"  mean?

Thanks for any help you can provide. Get as technical as is necessary.


PS: A Gnuemacs christmas wish list: ("What if...")
  * a RELEASED multiwindow(X) gnuemacs
  * support for proportional fonts under Xwindows (can you say wysiemacs?)
  * capability for prologish inferencing in gnuemacs lisp (i.e. implement
    the inference engine in C and make it callable from gnulisp.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	    Niels Mayer -- hplabs!mayer -- mayer@hplabs.hp.com
		       Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
			      Palo Alto, CA.
				   *