Tim,

> It's wierd; my code and the variable names I used clearly 
> imply the idea of headroom rather than total room, but the oldest
> sources I have only go back to 2.6 and that is indeed a total-room
> setup. Am I imagining things? Could be... too many cups of tea can do
> that to you. I can easily make it so that it works 'my' way on Acorns
> but I am interested in how people feel it ought to work as well.

I don't care the least bit. I have effectively disabled -memory: on Windows
for some time now and I have not heard a single complaint - to me this means
people really don't care about controlling the amount of memory. So anyone
who is interested in this matter should discuss it - I am definitely not ;-)

<afterthought>
The only sensible use for -memory on Windows would be to deliberately limit
the amount of memory for stress testing a Squeak system and how it would
behave under certain limited memory conditions. In this case it would
*probably* make more sense to specify it as an "overall amount" like on
pre-OSX Macs.
</afterthought>

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Tim Rowledge
> Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 7:16 AM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: memory allocation on commandline
> 
> 
> John Maloney <JohnMaloney at earthlink.net> appears to have written:
> 
> > I believe that, on the Mac, the memory parameter came from the the
> > "memory" setting in the application's "info" dialog, and it 
> really did
> > mean the *total* amount of memory for that application. One could
> > argue that users shouldn't need to worry about such things, but
> > that's just the way the Mac worked before OS X.
> True; the old Mac memory system was possibly the stupidest bit of
> systems programming seen by humankind since the reproductive 
> system was
> made autonomous instead of voluntary.
> > 
> > I have no objection to changing what the "-memory" command
> > line option does on other platforms, but on Mac OS 8 and 9, I think
> > that the way it currently works matches what pre-X Mac 
> users expect...
> > 
> > Ian and Andreas will probably have opinions about the *nix and Win32
> > VM's, but I seem to recall that "-memory" used to mean the 
> total memory
> > allocation on these platforms as well, up through 2.8 at least...
> It's wierd; my code and the variable names I used clearly 
> imply the idea
> of headroom rather than total room, but the oldest sources I have only
> go back to 2.6 and that is indeed a total-room setup. Am I imagining
> things? Could be... too many cups of tea can do that to you. I can
> easily make it so that it works 'my' way on Acorns but I am interested
> in how people feel it ought to work as well.
> 
> tim
> 
> -- 
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> A paperless office has about as much chance as a paperless bathroom.
> 
>