What is alloca()? [Generated by bison from flex]

[T. William Wells]

In article <1989Sep24.050214.13898 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
: It's a nonstandard botch (originating in some poorly-designed ancient Unix
: systems) that some of the Gnoids are really fond of.  The theory is that
: it's malloc() except that the storage automatically goes away when you leave
: the function it was called in.  This is more than a little difficult to
: implement on some machines...

The version of gas (Gnu assembler) I have uses alloca in two places;
neither of which is a particularly good place for it and one of which
is downright stupid. That latter is alloca'ing an array which can
never be over four bytes long. I found these because I won't use code
that uses alloca. And maybe when gas actually works on my system (its
opcode tables are incomplete), I'll actually use it.

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Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill at twwells.com