On Sun, 27 Jan 2019 23:47:09 -0500, Jim Mulder wrote: > >> If I were designing >> FREEMAIN from scratch, I would drop the LENGTH and just always free >> the entire block. Yes, you would lose the ability to free half of a >> buffer -- but gain some simplicity of design, and eliminate the >> nasty bug where you free all but 8 bytes of some repeatedly-obtained >> area, and never notice it until some customer runs out of (contiguous) >> memory. > OMG! A severe case of HLL-think! (But no garbage collection.)
Many years ago, I witnessed several assembler programmers being dragged unwittingly, often unwillingly into a HLL environment. Chief complaints were: o No facility to increment a pointer. o No facility to do a single new(); subdivide the block; and dispose() piecemeal. > For private storage (and also for common storage when >common storage tracking is not turned on), VSM does not >keep track of the size of the original request. Two >separate GETMAINs which end up being adjacent are >indistinguishable from one GETMAIN for the sum of the >sizes. > I hope no programmer counts on that. But I suspect some do and that was among the motivations for a compatibility option when the storage management scheme changed radically a few releases ago. --gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN