writing code over several lines

[Emile van Sebille]

"Peter Hansen"
> Is there a published algorithm behind this, or is it just some magic
> of the Timbot's that would be found only in the source?
>

Both  ;-)


>From cvs listobject.c...

 /* Round up:
  * If n <       256, to a multiple of        8.
  * If n <      2048, to a multiple of       64.
  * If n <     16384, to a multiple of      512.
  * If n <    131072, to a multiple of     4096.
  * If n <   1048576, to a multiple of    32768.
  * If n <   8388608, to a multiple of   262144.
  * If n <  67108864, to a multiple of  2097152.
  * If n < 536870912, to a multiple of 16777216.
  * ...
  * If n < 2**(5+3*i), to a multiple of 2**(3*i).
  *
  * This over-allocates proportional to the list size, making room
  * for additional growth.  The over-allocation is mild, but is
  * enough to give linear-time amortized behavior over a long
  * sequence of appends() in the presence of a poorly-performing
  * system realloc() (which is a reality, e.g., across all flavors
  * of Windows, with Win9x behavior being particularly bad -- and
  * we've still got address space fragmentation problems on Win9x
  * even with this scheme, although it requires much longer lists to
  * provoke them than it used to).

Emile van Sebille
emile at fenx.com