🚀 go-pugleaf

    This has been a sore point with me for some time.  ExcUuUse me, but
    WHY NOT!?  It seems to me that someone asked this several months ago
    and the reply was something like "it's too difficult" or something.

Yes, there's something called "memory fragmentation".  There shouldn't
in principle be any difficulty in zapping an accessory, but what is the
point except to recover the memory it was occupying?  But that memory is
a little block somewhere that is most likely not contiguous with the
rest of free memory since there are likely other desk accessories in the
way.  To make effective use of that memory, you either need address
mapping hardware (which the ST does not have) or you need a memory
allocation strategy that is able to make use of fragmented memory or you
need a way to move active processes so that you can coalesce the unused
blocks of memory.  Moving processes is dangerous, for they might have a
copy of their own or other processes' base page address tucked away in
storage somewhere.  One MIGHT be able to get DOS to know about the block
of memory freed up by a removed desk accessory so that at least Malloc
could use it, but that probably would not help most programs.  Your best
bet would be to load another smaller desk accessory into the same slot.

--Mike Fischer
  <fischer@yale.arpa>
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