Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH][5] Make temporary stack resizable (fixes #1098)

[John Cowan]

Peter Bex scripsit:

> As far as I know, R5RS doesn't say anything about a maximum number of
> procedure arguments in direct calls or when using apply.  In my book,
> it's "better" in some absolute way to remove any limitations beyond
> those which R5RS allows for.

The general permission to report implementation restrictions covers this;
the cases given in 1.3.2 are only examples.  No programming language I
know of sets an upper limit on code size, but all implementations do.

> Calling a function directly with 5000 arguments will "just work" in the
> common case.  However, if this call happens to occur while the stack is
> full, the assertion will be triggered.  Let's say this happens in
> production but not in your development setup, then it would be pretty
> hard to find this bug.

And if your production code is embedded in a device, it's really bad.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        address@hidden
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
        --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)