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From: mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: pessimal storage allocation, Continuations
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:54:39 +0000
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On Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:07:10 +0000, John Levine wrote:

> According to EricP  <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com>:
>>Each current local context could be allocated from a heap.
>>But be careful what you wish for.
>>We were playing with an IBM R6000 around 1990 which was supposed to
>>be this fast risc machine but we found it ran slower than our VAX.
>>We disassembled the code and found out that instead of a normal
>>decrement/increment stack it used a linked list of heap allocated
>> objects.
>>Every call did a malloc and every return did a free. All the hardware
>> speed
>>improvement had been squandered on this completely unnecessary ABI
>> overhead.
>
> Maybe it was an IBM thing. In the 1960s the IBM 360 Algol F compiler,
> which I always assumed was written because some European institution
> had it on a checklist rather than because they expected anyone to use
> it, did the same thing. Every time it entered a block it did a GETMAIN
> system call, and when it left the block it did a FREEMAIN, with all of
> the performance you'd expect.

The only thing I can comment on, here, is that 1108 Algol was much
faster than 360/67 Algol.
>
> Someone at Princeton patched it to do more sane allocation where it
> did a big GETMAIN and suballocated from that until it filled up and
> then did another one. I never wrote enough Algol to tell how well it
> worked.
>
> The compiler was a marvel of passive aggressive standards
> implementation.  The
> keywords were all quoted 'BEGIN' 'END' and unless you told it otherwise
> it used
> the 48 charater set so a semicolon was ., and assignment was .= with one
> dot,
> not two.  A squared was A'POWER'2.  I/O was procedures that used dataset
> numbers, 0 was the input deck, 1 was the printer, and you skipped to the
> next output record by padding out the current record to 80 spaces.
>
> 'COMMENT'TOO BAD THEY DID NOT USE 'TNEMMOC'.,
>
> Yuck.