Re: [9fans] pascal, TeX

[forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk]

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i suspect that's because the Pascal language took the novel approach of providing
neither guaranteed garbage collection nor a portable operator to free
memory without it.  there were several platform-specific methods, including
stack like heap allocation (which i think was used by one compiler).  `dispose'
ended up in the standard (but did not preclude implementing garbage collection).


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To: "erik quanstrom" <quanstro@speakeasy.net>, <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: [9fans] pascal, TeX
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:51:37 -0500
Message-ID: <EPEOIODEGHAONLDKOGLHKEGPCBAA.howard@research.bell-labs.com>

Knuth didn't trust Pascal memory management for some reason, so he avoided
using records and "new".  He did most data structures in huge arrays of
integers with punny macros to fake up data structures inside them.  It was
Pascal with Fortran for data structuring...

> knuth lives on his own planet. i believe it's called
> "the art of computer programming." ;-)
> also, due TeX's pascal heratage, it has an ungodly number
> of compiled-in limits.