Complexity and starting over on the JVM (ideas)

Michael van der Gulik mikevdg at gmail.com
Sun Feb 10 22:36:34 UTC 2008


On Feb 11, 2008 11:44 AM, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com>
wrote:

> Michael van der Gulik wrote:
> > What is a fractal stack?
>
> What I mean by that is, since full blocks may contain a reference to their
> environment on the stack, as long as the block is around, that part of the
> stack is around (including an ability to unwind it). This is different
> from
> other languages like C or Java which do not allow blocks, so the stack is
> always linear (though you may have a few in parallel, one for each
> thread).
> Perhaps I should have used "tree like"?  Consider that each block in turn
> might hold onto processes or other stack frames, and so on -- so in theory
> it might even become a random network of references, so "Tree like" and
> "Fractal" might both be wrong, since they imply hierarchy (though a
> hierarchy of stack frames is typical in practice).
>


How does having blocks make the stack non-linear? If I pop open a debugger,
the stack looks pretty linear to me.

Gulik.

-- 
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/mikevdg
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/
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