Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!news.glorb.com!news-out.readnews.com!news-xxxfer.readnews.com!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!nerds-end
From: George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: How to handle qualified identifiers such as x.y in a Pascal-like language
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:58:45 -0400
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 29
Sender: news@iecc.com
Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com
Message-ID: <11-07-009@comp.compilers>
References: <11-06-037@comp.compilers> <11-06-039@comp.compilers> <11-06-045@comp.compilers> <11-07-004@comp.compilers>
NNTP-Posting-Host: news.iecc.com
X-Trace: gal.iecc.com 1309706574 86250 64.57.183.58 (3 Jul 2011 15:22:54 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: abuse@iecc.com
NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 15:22:54 +0000 (UTC)
Keywords: storage, GC, symbols
Posted-Date: 03 Jul 2011 11:22:54 EDT
X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com
X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com
X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com
Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.compilers:185

On Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:31:40 -0700, BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> wrote:

<some interesting stuff about his own implementation of closure
invocation and GC>

>[This strikes me as all stuff the Lisp community figured out in about
>1980.  -John]

Most of it much earlier - the only thing yet missing is any kind of
standard call convention - apart from foreign calls (e.g., to C
libraries) nearly every Lisp handles its internal function calling
differently.

Closure invocation was implemented in the very first Lisp
implementation (1965?), as was reference counting GC.  By 1970 tracing
GC was rising and reference counting was falling out of favor.
Dijkstra and Lamport's incremental software GC  and the Lisp-2
incremental GC which used VMM page protection to implement the
tri-color abstraction, both debuted in 1967.  Cheney described his
semi-space copying collector in 1970.


Unfortunately, I started this by mentioning closures in my post.  I
didn't intend to clutter the thread with concepts that are too
advanced for the newbie OP, but rather just to indicate that the
method I was advocating to solve his problem had utility beyond his
current needs.

George