On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Alex Giannakopoulos <aeg...@blueyonder.co.uk> > Of course, by the time we get to 3-D tic-tac-toe on a torus, then cheap > tricks like "padding" to read will have to be discarded, and something more > serious adopted. (I mean, you're not going to pad a 3-d cube with 6 copies > of itself, are you? LOL)
Why not? For contrast, in lisp, it's traditional to use lists which double the storage needed to represent a list of numbers (a list is constructed using car,cdr pairs where the car holds data and the cdr is a pointer). And, some garbage collection techniques can require twice the total in-use storage. The idea that "any memory which is not in use is being wasted" has some validity. Also, on my phone, I've numerous applications I do not use and which I cannot turn off which each occupy about 8MB. In contrast, six copies of a 3D tic-tac-toe board is probably about 1k of memory... Anyways, there will be times when it's important to conserve memory, but in those situations you will probably want to use a measurement-based mechanism for deciding how to use your available memory. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
