Thu, 13 Aug 1998 09:56:53 +0200
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On Wed, 12 August 1998 21:49:41 +0200,
Martin Schroeder <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> In <[log in to unmask]> Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> >b) will be drastic: a current LaTeX format (without any packages
> >loaded) uses about 51088 words of memory before begin document; if the
> >average word length in commands is 10 (which is far too low with a
> >consequent implemented module concept) then this gets basically blown
> >to 500000 which is twice the amount of main mem
[...]
Frank, either I misunderstand your ``word'' or you are wrong with this
analysis. A control sequence is one token and will use exactly the
same amount of TeX's ``main memory'' independent on the length of its
name. The names of control sequences are put in TeX's ``string
pool'', thus the string pool will grow if the lengths of control
sequence's name will be enlarged in a module concept.
> > that i have available
> >on this machine for everything. i just looked: when we compiled the
> >Companion the log file showed 208957 words of memory out of 262141
> >try to imagine to what size this would grow.
... which had other reasons (a bunch of macro definitions/packages,
many and complex box constructions, large and detailed (PicTeX?)
figures etc.), hadn't it?
> I just looked: emTeX has an hTeX version where main memory can be configured
> to be between 2097152 (2^21) and 4194304 (2^22). And I don't think there's a
> limit in TeX to make it even bigger if needed. :-)
There are limits for TeX's main memory size, for a ``bigTeX'' version
with double-sized mem words it's upto 2^32, which should be fairly
enough for the next years. ;-)
> But I agree that this should be avoided -- but not a taboo.
IMHO a module concept will be a good idea, but the extended use of the
string pool because of a long common csname prefix
(e.g. \contributed/supported/...) should be avoided. String pool
space is cheap (one byte for each character) in comparison to a main
memory word (4 resp. 8 bytes for each word = token in a token list,
hlist character node etc.), nonetheless it should be used reasonable.
Just my $0.02.
Best wishes,
-bernd
member of the e-TeX team
_____________________________________________________________________
Bernd Raichle "Le langage est source
Autor des `german.sty' (aktuell: v2.5e) de malentendus"
(A. de Saint-Exupery)
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