C stack frame sizes

[Mike Lutz]

>One point which hasn't been made about the issue of stack frame sizes,
>... [is that] if you call a function right at the start of your program which
>uses lots of stack space it stays allocated.

Actually, this was use to advantage in the original Pascal compiler
system from Amsterdam.  One of the C programs in the set (I forget
which one) used *gobs* of data space, so to make it run on a PDP-11 the
I/O buffers were declared as local variables in the main function, and
thus were on the stack.  Given the constraints imposed by the PDP-11
MMU, this actually resulted in a net gain in useful data memory as
compared to allocating buffers dynamically using sbrk.
-- 
Mike Lutz	Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY
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