How far can stack [LIFO] solve do automatic garbage collection and prevent memory leak ?

[Hugh Aguilar]

On Aug 18, 6:23 pm, Standish P <stnd... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 17, 6:38 pm, John Passaniti <john.passan... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You asked if Forth "borrowed" lists from Lisp.  It did not.  In Lisp,
> > lists are constructed with pair of pointers called a "cons cell".
> > That is the most primitive component that makes up a list.  Forth has
> > no such thing; in Forth, the dictionary (which is traditionally, but
> > not necessarily a list) is a data structure that links to the previous
> > word with a pointer.  
>
> Would you show me a picture, ascii art or whatever for Forth ? I know
> what lisp lists look like so I dont need that for comparison. Forth
> must have a convention and a standard or preferred practice for its
> dicts. However, let me tell you that in postscript the dictionaries
> can be nested inside other dictionaries and any such hiearchical
> structure is a nested associative list, which is what linked list,
> nested dictionaries, nested tables are.

You can see an example of lists in my novice package (in the list.4th
file):
http://www.forth.org/novice.html
Also in there is symtab, which is a data structure intended to be used
for symbol tables (dictionaries). Almost nobody uses linked lists for
the dictionary anymore (the FIG compilers of the 1970s did, but they
are obsolete).

I must say, I've read through this entire thread and I didn't
understand *anything* that *anybody* was saying (especially the OP). I
really recommend that people spend a lot more time writing code, and a
lot less time with all of this pseudo-intellectual nonsense. This
whole thread (and most of what I see on C.L.F. these days) reminds me
of the "dialectic method" of the early Middle Ages --- a lot of talk
and no substance.

Write some programs! Are we not programmers?