Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!ihlpb!tainter
From: tainter@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Tainter)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: How many stacks?
Message-ID: <8604@ihlpb.ATT.COM>
Date: 25 Aug 88 01:05:47 GMT
References: <219@lakart.UUCP> <5542@june.cs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: tainter@ihlpb.UUCP (55521-Tainter,J.A.)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 16

In article <5542@june.cs.washington.edu> pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel) writes:
>dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough) writes:
>>[ suggestion: always need AT LEAST ONE stack for recursive languages ]

>Some C implementations, I'm told (haven't seen them personally) on
>older architectures (for which there is no explicit stack support)
>implement recursion by allocating call frames off of the heap and
>explicitly freeing them when done.

You haven't eliminated the stack in this case.  You have just made it
less obviously a stack.  You will find that these frames still need to
form a stack for call returns.

>		    pardo@cs.washington.edu

--j.a.tainter