On Sun, 25 Feb 2001 14:34:38 -0800 "Raab, Andreas" <Andreas.Raab at disney.com> wrote:
>However, that's not quite the entire story. You have to keep in mind that at
>some point you could a) run out of swap space (which is a Very Bad Thing if
>it really happens) and b) that an infinite loop would keep allocating huge
>amounts of memory. As it is, you get a low space warning when you hit the
>boundary and the low space warning is a useful thing to have.
>
>[Hm ... makes me wonder how the commercial ST versions deal with that
>problem. Anyone dare to comment?!]

I seem to remember some years ago using Smalltalk VSE on NT. Smalltalk garbageCollect or its equivalent reported some *really* large number, either gigabytes or 100's of megabytes (on a machine with 32 meg of real memory). When something started using too much memory, the closest indication one got was pronounced sluggishness and, if you listened closely, a disk drive earning its paycheck. I spent two years working in that environment and never got over the hopeless feeling of not knowing how much memory I had been allocated and how much was left.

Cheers,
Bob