[Q] How far can stack [LIFO] solve do automatic garbage collection and prevent memory leak ?
Because a stack has push and pop, it is able to release and allocate memory. We envisage an exogenous stack which has malloc() associated with a push and free() associated with a pop. The algorithm using the stack would have to be "perfect" to prevent stack overflow or condition of infinite recursion depth. This would involve data type checking to filter out invalid input. The task must be casted in an algorithm that uses the stack. Then the algorithm must be shown to be heuristically or by its metaphor, to be correct using informal reasoning. Are there any standard textbooks or papers that show stacks implemented in C/C++/Python/Forth with malloc/free in push and pop ? If Forth is a general processing language based on stack, is it possible to convert any and all algorithms to stack based ones and thus avoid memory leaks since a pop automatically releases memory when free is an intrinsic part of it. K&R ANSI has the example of modular programming showing how to implement a stack but he uses a fixed length array. It is also possibly an endogenous stack. We look for an exogenous stack so that element size can vary. ======= Standish P <stnd...@gmail.com> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list