back to the (ivory) tower (alloca)

[Steve Summit]

I generally shy away from "edge of the envelope" functionality,
even if documented and "official": like right-of-way rules, the
"official"ness doesn't help you much when you get burned.

I've used alloca exactly once, and I submit that I had no
alternative: it was exactly the right thing to use for allocating
the space for the local variables of the function being
interpreted by a C interpreter I wrote once.  An explicit
malloc/free wouldn't do, because of the possibility that the
function being interpreted could call longjmp...

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs at adam.pika.mit.edu