Re: Historical Implementations to Garbage Collectors

By the 1970s (basic 6th edition) at Dartmouth, strings were garbage
collected, much ike XPL mentioned here. A form of subroutine supported
recursion with local variables, so the string pool was not static. instead
all string variables were marked ( possibly kept on a linked list). To GC,
the runtime marked and compacted all referenced string text.


String text was simple contiguous storage with no embedded pointers, so
this was straightforward - unlike some languages, where strings were linked
lists of fragments.


The runtime system borrowed the teletype (stdout) buffer for temporary
storage during GC. The same trick was used for Dartmouth XPL.
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mac the naC/f

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