In article <····@ucsbcsl.ucsb.edu> ····@orange.ucsb.edu writes:
>Is there a way to dynamically deallocate an array, an inverse to make-array?
Common Lisp (and most other Lisp dialects) has no standard way to
dynamically deallocate anything, unless you consider CLOSE to be a form of
deallocation.
Some implementations provide some deallocation primitives, although the
effectiveness will often depend on the memory management implementation.
For instance, many implementations allocate linearly through memory (or
blocks of memory called "areas") and use a copying GC, and in such
implementations, it would only be useful to explicitly deallocate the most
recently allocated object; Symbolics Genera includes a deallocation
primitive that does nothing unless the object it's given is the last object
in the area, and otherwise just adjusts the area's allocation pointer.
Modern generational GC techniques make such a primitive less valuable.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.
······@think.com
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