Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: What is alloca()? [Generated by bison from flex] Message-ID: <1989Sep26.190516.3629@twwells.com> Date: 26 Sep 89 19:05:16 GMT References: <3823.2518c141@uwovax.uwo.ca> <1989Sep24.050214.13898@utzoo.uucp> Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Lines: 17 In article <1989Sep24.050214.13898@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: : It's a nonstandard botch (originating in some poorly-designed ancient Unix : systems) that some of the Gnoids are really fond of. The theory is that : it's malloc() except that the storage automatically goes away when you leave : the function it was called in. This is more than a little difficult to : implement on some machines... The version of gas (Gnu assembler) I have uses alloca in two places; neither of which is a particularly good place for it and one of which is downright stupid. That latter is alloca'ing an array which can never be over four bytes long. I found these because I won't use code that uses alloca. And maybe when gas actually works on my system (its opcode tables are incomplete), I'll actually use it. --- Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill bill@twwells.com