notes on the end of volume 1
2.3.5 lists and garbage collection
This chapter was largely about LISP lists so I skimmed most of it.
2.4 multilinked strcutures
This section talked about COBOL structures that contain nested data like the following:
1 foo
2 def
3 ghi
3 jkl
2 bar
2 baz
1 abc
2 def
3 ghi
3 jkl
2 xyz
3 bar
3 baz
The idea is that a COBOL statement like "bar of foo", "ghi of def of foo", "baz of abc", and "ghi of def of abc" could be used to access elements of the data structure. To make this work, each node was connected to a tree structure as well as to a labeling structure. The labeling structure grouped all of the like-named nodes together and the tree structure stored parent/sibling/child relations but there still only needed to be one set of nodes.
2.5 dynamic storage allocation
He talks about a more practical malloc situation where the application might need blocks of memory of any size. I thought it was particularly interesting that first fit turned out to be generally better than best fit..
