Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aablue!jb
From: jb@aablue.UUCP (John B Scalia)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: libpw.a
Summary: I agree its pretty poor, but ...
Keywords: alloca() lipw.a
Message-ID: <564@aablue.UUCP>
Date: 17 Apr 89 18:46:50 GMT
References: <157@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> <10013@smoke.BRL.MIL> <8184@chinet.chi.il.us> <1250@frog.UUCP>
Reply-To: jb@aablue.UUCP (John B Scalia)
Distribution: na
Organization: A A Blueprint Co., Inc. - Akron, OH
Lines: 18

In article <1250@frog.UUCP> john@frog.UUCP (John Woods) writes:
>[deleted for brevity]
>Programmers shouldn't use alloca().  The standard implementation of allocating
>a chunk of stack is not applicable to all computer architectures or compilers,
>and the non-stack-based implementations require too much conspiracy and
>machination to be efficient and worthwhile.

OK, I agree that libpw.a is pretty much worthless, but after your statement
about alloca(), I've got another question. If programmers shouldn't use it,
why did GNU require it for installing their grep facility? I'll admit that
I haven't studied the code thoroughly, but their implementation doesn't seem
that bad.

-- 
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