Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!husc6!mit-eddie!fenchurch.mit.edu!jbs From: jbs@fenchurch.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: alloca(), #if, and other controversial things... Message-ID: <9915@eddie.MIT.EDU> Date: 21 Aug 88 23:55:39 GMT References: <8808171410.AA05337@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <1259@garth.UUCP> <9912@eddie.MIT.EDU> <1271@garth.UUCP> Sender: uucp@eddie.MIT.EDU Reply-To: jbs@fenchurch.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal) Organization: MIT EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA Lines: 14 In article <1271@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes: >>Take a look at Scheme. >Eh? Summary, please? Sorry. Scheme is a lexically scoped LISP dialect, implementations of which often place environments (local variable bindings) on a stack rather than the heap (when possible). This can give you both the generality of a heap and the efficiency of a stack. It is also interesting (although unrelated) that implementations of Scheme are encouraged to support tail-recursion efficiently, making it the priamary iterative mechanism. Jeff Siegal