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A famous routine, in particular in GNU context, is the allocation routine alloca(). Alloca allocates memory in such a way that it is automatically free'd when the block is exited. Most implementations does this by adjusting the stack pointer. Since not all C environments can support it, its use is discouraged, but it is included in the xlc compiler. In order to make the compiler aware that you intend to use alloca, you must put the line #pragma alloca before any other statements in the C source module(s) where alloca is called. If you don't do this, xlc will not recognize alloca as anything special, and you will get errors during linking. For AIX 3.2, it may be easier to use the -ma flag.
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Last Update May 13 2007 @ 00:21 AM