alloca (was Re: Are yacc parsers portable ?)

[Michael Meissner]

In article <62412 at sun.uucp> swilson at sun.UUCP (Scott Wilson) writes:

| If alloca is such a wonderful function (and I'm NOT saying it isn't)
| then why isn't it part of the ANSI draft proposed standard libraries
| for C?  Are you saying that a "self-respecting" C compiler/library
| vendor will be doing users a disservice by providing only ANSI memory
| routines (malloc, calloc, realloc, and free)?  I would argue that it
| is better to conform to a standard even with its shortcomings than
| attempt to make something universal by "forcing" it on  everyone.

It was proposed to the ANSI committee, and it got shot down, for two reasons:
1) it was judged to be too late;  2) the systems don't have frame pointers
on their stacks would have to recognize it as a builtin and support it
through some method.
-- 
Michael Meissner, Data General.

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