terrell@OHIO-STATE.ARPA.UUCP (03/21/87)
There's an interesting problem with the OSS Pascal memavail function. The value returned by this function does not increase after the dispose procedure has returned some memory to the dynamic heap. The value only changes (decreases) following a call to the new procedure, or when the os allocates some memory. When I first noticed this, I assumed that dispose simply didn't return memory to the heap. In fact it does, but the value returned by memavail does not reflect this. To ascertain that dispose does in fact return memory to the heap, I wrote a test program that repeatedly allocates and frees memory. It worked fine. The solution to this problem is, I suppose, to keep track of available memory manually when using the dynamic heap. Terrell