commentary

[Hugh Hoover <heh>]

This statement is not meant to take ANYTHING from the excellent work that
eric (hill) has done in getting garbage collection working.  It is a statement
about building garbage collection on a language that was never expected or
intended to have it.
  After spending 2 days mucking around with the Table code to make it compile
under the SPTR restrictions required for collection, I have to say that
the code is becoming very stilted, considerably larger, and very odd looking.
Most of these are caused by the language simply not fulfilling the spec.  The
"sorry, not implemented: ..." messages are causing a tripling in the size
of many inner loops because && and || don't work with Vars (SPTR's), all
(well almost) all returns become 2 or 3 lines of code, or require a completly
unnecessary cast, etc, etc.  Very little of this can be corrected by
automatic translation fixes (unless Dean gets VERY clever and spends a
considerable amount of time).
  Well, had to get that out of my system.  I not suggesting we stop the
garbage collection work.

  Back to expanding loops!
--Hugh