Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!aitken
From: aitken@svax.cs.cornell.edu (William Aitken)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: alloca
Message-ID: <19895@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 88 15:44:53 GMT
References: <3950010@eecs.nwu.edu> <62170@sun.uucp> <62363@sun.uucp> <8293@smoke.ARPA>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: aitken@svax.cs.cornell.edu (William Aitken)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
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In article <8293@smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>
>The C vendors aren't evil (?) either; requiring support for alloca()
>does impose an undue burden on implementations on some architectures.
>
Could someone give a concrete example of an architecture on which alloca is
difficult to implement, and explain what it is that makes automatic
arrays possible, but alloca difficult?   If C were to provide a means 
to declare an automatic array with size that depended on an integer valued
argument, many of the uses of alloca would disappear;  would this be any
easier to implement than alloca?  Why?

						---- Bill.

William E. Aitken <aitken@svax.cs.cornell.edu>        (607)257-2542(h)
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