🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <751@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk> cdsm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Chris Moss) writes:
[...]
>so they can be represented by parameterless procedures (or procedures that
>take only input bindings). Thus they do not produce garbage on the stack
                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>if the top level is a tail recursive procedure.
>Is there any way such a program can run out of memory?

It just depends what You mean by garbage. Try the following little program
which implements the equivalent of LISP's "blam"-lists:

blam(0,[]).
blam(N,[L|L]) :- N > 0, M is N - 1, blam(M,L).
 
..., blam(32,L), assert(little_fact(L)),...

Even if this would be successfully executed - is there any Prolog which
can do this? Quite shure not (Might be - that some LISP-based implementation 
take this, but this is only a very vage speculation) 
However You'll also have problems when just trying to copy such a blam list.

Now this was the worst case which might occur: You had a term represented
by N lists which implements a term consisting of 2^N - 1 lists. In practical 
programs You`ll probably get only some growth nearer to k*N when You use
shared variables heaviliy. Most probably when transforming graphs. 

So my question is just. Do You or anyone else have applications using shared
variables <which are later on bound to some structures> ? :-)
 
Ulrich Neumerkel  (ulrich@vip.UUCP  UUCP: ...!mcvax!tuvie!vip!ulrich) 
<<please don't type "r", but mail to the adress above>>