Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!zodiac!joyce!sri-unix!garth!smryan
From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: How many stacks?
Message-ID: <1339@garth.UUCP>
Date: 29 Aug 88 20:12:08 GMT
References: <219@lakart.UUCP> <5542@june.cs.washington.edu> <8604@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <636@proxftl.UUCP>
Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan)
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 17

>Yes he has.  A `stack', as he was using the term, refers to a
>particular way of using memory.  What he has is a linked list.
>Both have the characteristics you need for implementing
>recursion.
>
>There is a use of `stack' that refers to any way of doing LIFO
>but that use does *not* talk about implementation.  Since the
>original discussion was talking about stacks in the sense of
>hardware stacks or memory set aside for a stack, this use is
>irrelevant.

Since I'm partly responsible, let me say I was talking about stacks as an
abstract type not a PDP-11 style implementation.

Before everybody gets all hot and botherred and say this is not a PDP-11
issue, may I remind you not all machines provide two address spaces for
a task. If all code and data goes into a single address space, the stack
implementation is inherently messy.