Re: DEFSTRUCT, reclaimable storage, and "resources"

[BAK at MIT-AI (William A. Kornfeld)]

If I understand the Lispm resource feature, it requires allocation and
deallocation to happen within some lexical contour.  Many of the
applications I have do not behave in a way that could take advantage of
this facility.  For example, I make use of a queue of linked structures
(each one containing a pointer to the next).  After a structure has
"reached" the front of the queue (after some indeterminate time, and not
within the lexical contour in which it was created) the structure is
reclaimable.  My suggestion still stands, although I guess it is
possible that a new facility could be created that deals with more
general objects than structures implemented as art-q arrays.