Re: Historical Implementations to Garbage Collectors

<lpsantil@gmail.com> wrote in message news:14-05-001@comp.compilers...
> I'm interested in studying historical implementations of garbage
> collection in early programming languages (BASIC, Lisp, etc). I'm
> especially interested in language/runtime interface descriptions.
> Does anybody have references they can share?
>
> [My LISP 1.5 manual says they used a straightforward mark and sweep
> GC. The only complication was that list storage cells had a free bit
> they could use for marking, while cells used for strings didn't so
> it was a separate area and they used a separate bitmap. I'm fairly
> sure that early Dartmouth BASIC was all static allocated, no GC. -John]


In the Microsoft BASIC used in the TRS-80, there is a bug in the string
garbage collection. As far as I know, this was *never* corrected, but as
the string space fills... the GC fails way too soon. This is sort of
historic, as the TRS-80 was using MS BASIC in the early 1980's.
--


numerist at aquaporin4 dot com

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