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

Hugh Aguilar hughaguilar96 at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 24 18:25:25 EDT 2010


On Aug 24, 9:24 am, David Kastrup <d... at gnu.org> wrote:
> Anybody worth his salt in his profession has a trail of broken things in
> his history.

When I was employed as a Forth programmer, I worked for two brothers.
The younger one told me a funny story about when he was 13 or 14 years
old. He bought a radio at a garage sale. The radio worked perfectly,
except that it had no case. He was mighty proud of his radio and was
admiring it, but he noticed that the tubes were dusty. That wouldn't
do! Such a wonderful radio ought to look as good as it sounds! So he
removed the tubes and cleaned them all off with a soft cloth. At this
time it occurred to him that maybe he should have kept track of which
sockets the tubes had come out of. He put the tubes back in so that
they looked correct, but he couldn't be sure.

Fortunately, his older brother who was in high school knew
*everything* about electronics, or at least, that is what he claimed.
So the boy gets his big brother and asks him. The brother says: "There
is one way to know for sure if the tubes are in correctly or not ---
plug the radio in." He plugs in the radio; it makes a crackling noise
and begins to smoke. The boy desperately yanks the cord, but it is too
late; his wonderful radio is toast. The older brother says: "Now you
know!"



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