🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <18p7lpINNc73@almaak.usc.edu> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
>   I find it hard to appreciate why TeX should not know how to dynamically
>   allocate RAM on demand.  Does this have something to do with being
>   written in pascal?  I seem to recall that new() returns nil if
>   you are out of memory..
>
>   In any case, where is TeX implementation going in the future?
>

I've been wondering a lot about this, and I have come up with this
solution (based upon a discussion with a Real Programmer):

When Knuth wrote TeX, he knew what he was doing. This is a fundamental
assumption, and all arguments pro or con should be checked against this.

Now, Web, I suppose, supports dynamic allocation of memory through
Pascal's new() operator, whose behavior in extreme cases is unspecified
and the execution speed of which is compiler dependent. 

A similar problem is that if you use dynamic allocation of memory, you
can't compare the speed of different implementations of a given algorithm,
partly because the speed of different types of pointer allocation is
compiler dependent and not easily computed. To be able to rank
implementations of algorithms according to their speed is crucial if a
program does a lot of operations on its data structure, as TeX does.

If this is correct, I demand that someone makes a note of this in the FAQ
file.

If not, please enlighten me and redirect flames to /dev/null.


--
       Rolf Lindgren           |       "The opinions expressed above are
       616 Bjerke Studentheim  |        not necessarily those of anyone"
       N-0589 OSLO 5           |           rolfl.lindgren@usit.uio.no