Re: The birth of BASIC

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#623699

From: Peter Flass
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2018 20:58

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Questor <usenet@only.tnx> wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Jun 2018 09:19:42 -0400, Dan Espen <dan1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Peter Flass <peter...@yahoo.com> writes:
>>> Gareth's Downstairs Computer
>>> <headstone255.but.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> On 03/06/2018 22:40, Peter Flass wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Some problems are easily solved by recursion that are significantly more
>>>>> complicated otherwise.
>>>> 
>>>> I would be interested to know some examples, please?
>>> 
>>> Depth-first search of a binary tree. Top-down parsing.
>>> 
>>> Anything that requires retracing a path thru a data structure. Without
>>> recursion you have to maintain a table to keep track of where you've been
>>> and where you're going. Recursion just handles it naturally.
>> 
>> Yes, but using a table, the application has some way of detecting
>> running out of storage.  For example, if the table depth is
>> exceeded, the application can attempt to allocate a larger table
>> and then fail with a message when storage is exceeded.
>> With recursion, you eventually run out of storage but with
>> any language I am familiar with it your program just dies.
> 
> DEC hardware can trap stack overflows (and underflows).  That facility doesn't
> always make it into HLLs, nor the ability to do something about them.
> 
> 

It's the doing something that's a problem. OS/2 used a "guard page" on the
stack (hardware trap). You could set it to trap on accesses to the bottom
page or so of the stack, so when the stack was *almost* used up you got
notified, in time to do something. Once the stack is full, it's too late.

-- 
Pete

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From: Peter Flass <peter...@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: The birth of BASIC
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2018 16:58:25 -0400
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