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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.

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Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com