Re: please help concerning specpdl

["Davis Herring" <herring@lanl.gov>]

> Why let-binding-variables are memorized exactly here and not elsewhere ?

Flet memorizes their old values on the stack; when it returns (or
otherwise is exited), the old values are copied back, so they can't be
needed beyond the lifetime of that stack frame.

> why the do-while is good in this case, and not simply brackets?

So that the whole thing is one statement that needs a ;, just like a
normal function call.  If it were brackets, you couldn't do

if(x) SAFE_ALLOCA(...);
else y=x;

> I see that inside unbind_to, the symbols are unbounded 1 by one. Why the
> specpdl_ptr is not decremented directly with count ?

Because you need to do something with each record: restore old values for
symbols, call functions registered with record_unwind_protect(), etc.

> Probably because unbind_to is called from lisp code by (throw 'symbol
> value), and specpdl_ptr must decrement 1 by 1 until the 'symbol is dound
> on the stack ?

catch-tags are searched separately: see struct catchtag.

> Apart from (throw ... ), is which other situation unbind_to is called ?

The other important one is Fsignal (quit and other errors).

> I see that GCPROx macros are used to protect the variables of type Lisp
> Object on the stack of C code (that the compiler creates), not to protect
> the lisp objects in specpdl. The GCPRO protection is against the algorthm
> of conservative stack. Am I right ?

I believe the GCPRO draws the attention of the stack checker to those Lisp
objects to make sure that they're not collected.

Davis

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