OpenEuphoria

Re: Garbage and macros

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at EMAIL.MSN.COM> Feb 16, 1998
• 617 views

Rob Craig wrote:
>> If you need to save space, it may help to set a large sequence
>>  to {} when you no longer need it's value, but remember that
>>  Euphoria will automatically free all the private variables of a routine
>>  when that routine returns. Whenever you assign a new value to
>>  a variable, any space used by the previous value is recycled.

Daniel Johnson asks:
> If it is in the main program code, would it be unrealistic to
> expect the interpreter to figure out that the variable is
> not used again ? It would be
> nice to have memory matters taken completely off our hands,
> as this is one of the things Euphoria boasts about
> eg dynamic resizing and reformatting.

It's theoretically impossible for any language compiler to
*always* know if a variable will be used again, but it is
possible in certain *limited* cases, using something called
"data flow" analysis. I implemented data flow analysis
in another compiler I developed a several years ago, but I'm not
sure if or when I will do it for Euphoria.

Regards,
     Rob Craig
     Rapid Deployment Software