alloca

[William Aitken]

In article <8293 at smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>
>The C vendors aren't evil (?) either; requiring support for alloca()
>does impose an undue burden on implementations on some architectures.
>
Could someone give a concrete example of an architecture on which alloca is
difficult to implement, and explain what it is that makes automatic
arrays possible, but alloca difficult?   If C were to provide a means 
to declare an automatic array with size that depended on an integer valued
argument, many of the uses of alloca would disappear;  would this be any
easier to implement than alloca?  Why?

						---- Bill.

William E. Aitken <aitken at svax.cs.cornell.edu>        (607)257-2542(h)
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