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