How many stacks?

[Tainter]

In article <5542 at june.cs.washington.edu> pardo at uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel) writes:
>dg at 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 at cs.washington.edu

--j.a.tainter