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From: scs@athena.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: back to the (ivory) tower (alloca)
Message-ID: <5810@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 17 Jun 88 03:26:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Lines: 12

I generally shy away from "edge of the envelope" functionality,
even if documented and "official": like right-of-way rules, the
"official"ness doesn't help you much when you get burned.

I've used alloca exactly once, and I submit that I had no
alternative: it was exactly the right thing to use for allocating
the space for the local variables of the function being
interpreted by a C interpreter I wrote once.  An explicit
malloc/free wouldn't do, because of the possibility that the
function being interpreted could call longjmp...

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs@adam.pika.mit.edu