[OT] Re: static, global variable memory allocation

matevzb wrote On 02/06/07 16:30,:
On Feb 6, 9:40 pm, Eric Sosman <Eric.Sos...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard Heathfield wrote On 02/06/07 14:03,:




santosh said:

<snip>

What a pointless interview question!

Well, I suppose you meant to say heap instead of head. The more proper
term is free store.

So I have always been led to believe, but I can find no reference to
this term in C89 (I didn't check C99, but I certainly recall that "free
store" was the allegedly canonical term well before C99 was ratified).

Does anyone know why "free store" is given canonical status?

I've got the opposite question: Does anyone know why
"heap" has come to mean just a big bucket of bytes, while
once upon a time it meant a specific kind of binary tree
(c.f. Heapsort)?

--
Eric.Sos...@xxxxxxx

Presumably to differentiate it from the stack - which is an ordered
pile and the heap isn't. Interestingly, stack seems to be mentioned
more often than heap, e.g. B reference manuals contain... erm... heaps
of stack?

The first time I encountered what we now call a "stack,"
it was called a "roll." That seems to have been an unusual
term; the more common phrase was "push-down list," usually
abbreviated "PDL" and pronounced "puddle." (When you ran out
of what we call "stack space," you had a "puddle overflow.")

Knuth also lists "reversion storage," "nesting store,"
"pile," "last-in-first-out list," and "yo-yo list" as terms
that have been used for "stack." Of these, the only one I
ever personally encountered was "LIFO list" (or sometimes
"LIFO stack," which nowadays seems redundant).

As for "heap," it had its "specially-structured binary
tree" meaning at least as far back as 1964 when Williams
invented Heapsort. Can anyone cite a pre-1964 computer-
related use of "heap" in the "big bag of bytes" sense? Or
has a once-precise term been stripped of its precision?

--
Eric.Sosman@xxxxxxx
.

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