Re: [clisp-list] Making arrays from scratch

[Vebjorn L. <ljo...@lj...>]

Sam Steingold <sd...@gn...> writes:

> no, and not likely to be implementable because CLISP has a copying GC.
> (actually Vladimir has introduced "pinned" objects not movable by GC
> for MT)

I was hoping it would be possible to have Lisp objects outside Lisp's
heap (do you call this "foreign space" in CLISP?) and therefore out of
the reach of the GC.

> why do you want to do this?

I need random access to a large number of cytometric measurements stored
in a file.  I would like to avoid reading the entire file into memory.
It would be convenient to simply index a Lisp array and leave it to the
memory manager to decide which chunks of the file to read and when, and
mmapping would accomplish that.

I noticed just now that CLISP's array dimension limit is only 2^24 - 1,
so the question of mmapping is moot, as I'll have to read chunks into
smaller arrays anyway.  

Thanks for responding.

Vebjorn