🚀 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..

Yes, it has something to do with being written in Pascal, namely the
demand for portability.

The Pascal Report (3rd ed., for ISO Pascal Standard, appendix A) does
not define the behaviour of new if one runs out of memory. So, for
the sake of portability, one must not rely on any specific behaviour.

Of course, this does not hinder anyone writing a change file which
uses the features of its special Pascal compiler. Actually, we did
this a few years ago for an Atari ST port. But this was a brute force
approach which cannot be used in VM environments.

--
Joachim

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Joachim Schrod			Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany