[gclist] Canonical citation for "memory pools"

[John R Levine]

> Does anyone have a canonical citation for "memory pools/arenas? i.e. The
> memory management scheme where you allocate several objects in one big
> chunk of space and deallocate all the objects in one go.

PL/I has AREAs, storage pools in which you can allocate variables, and use
either POINTERs or OFFSETs from the base of the area to refernce them. The
IBM documentation implies that the main reason to have them is so you can
write an area out to disk or tape, read it back later, and have the
offsets still valid, but it makes it quite clear that when you free the
area, all of its contents are freed as well.

I believe this was in the original version of PL/I which was written in
about 1963.  It's such an obvious and useful technique that I'd be
surprised if it wasn't used in the 1950s.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
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