Abstract Heresies

Imagine that we have a boatload of memory and we're nowhere near the limit. Suppose, too, that we allocate memory simply by bumping the...

Theorem: The mean lifetime of a heap allocated object is equal to the mean amount of reachable storage. Proof: This is Little's Law...

We model the Lisp heap as a queuing system. A “queuing system” consists of discrete objects we shall call “items” that “arrive” at some ra...

In Chapter 5 of Building Intuition: Insights from Basic Operations Management Models and Principles , edited by D. Chhajed and T. J. Lowe, S...

Here is a chart of the number of words in use after each garbage collection (for MIT/GNU Scheme compiling itself with a heap of 1935360 word...

Garbage collection gives us the illusion of nearly unlimited memory for temporary storage. To pull off this illusion, we must be able to sa...

John McCarthy 1927 - 2011