<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Feb 11, 2008 11:44 AM, Paul D. Fernhout <<a href="mailto:pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com">pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Michael van der Gulik wrote:<br>> What is a fractal stack?<br><br>What I mean by that is, since full blocks may contain a reference to their<br>environment on the stack, as long as the block is around, that part of the<br>
stack is around (including an ability to unwind it). This is different from<br>other languages like C or Java which do not allow blocks, so the stack is<br>always linear (though you may have a few in parallel, one for each thread).<br>
Perhaps I should have used "tree like"? Consider that each block in turn<br>might hold onto processes or other stack frames, and so on -- so in theory<br>it might even become a random network of references, so "Tree like" and<br>
"Fractal" might both be wrong, since they imply hierarchy (though a<br>hierarchy of stack frames is typical in practice).<br><font color="#888888"></font></blockquote><div><br><br>How does having blocks make the stack non-linear? If I pop open a debugger, the stack looks pretty linear to me.<br>
</div></div><br>Gulik.<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><a href="http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg">http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg</a><br><a href="http://gulik.pbwiki.com/">http://gulik.pbwiki.com/</a>