D-Mac's Stuff

From dmr@bell-lbs.com Wed Feb  2 00:02:18 2000
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From: Dennis Ritchie 
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: !alloca (was: Re: How's this: Where do I get a C99 compiler?)
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 19:08:12 +0000
Organization: Lucent Technologies, Columbus, Ohio
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As a point of history, alloca was first done
by Ken Thompson between the 6th and 7th edition
PDP-11 systems.  Because of the stack layout,
this was trivial and robust against most of
the obvious failures (not f(a, alloca(10), b)
though.)

When we started doing the Interdata port,
alloca looked quite hard to do and much less
robust.  So I extirpated it; none of our
distributions had it.

Somehow, however, it had escaped, perhaps
in a PWB distribution.  Or perhaps it
was reinvented.

	Dennis

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