Hi Kashyap, > I noticed that in the linked list of free cells, "car" is used as the next > pointer. Is the choice arbitrary? I could've been "cdr" too right? Just > curious if there is some interesting reason behind it :)
It is almost arbitrary. A very tiny, very theoretical, reason is a possibly faster traversal of the heap when the CDRs are not needed (e.g. when counting the length of the free list), because then the access is a direct pointer dereference without the need for an offset in the CPU instruction. On a modern CPU the effect is not measurable at all. ☺/ A!ex -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe
