Subject: (time) & Space:

From: "Joseph O'Rourke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 16:04:41 -0400

Can anyone explain to me how to find out what is the meaning of the
"Space:" output from the (time) function?  I ask because this is not the
type of information found in general Common Lisp manuals, and also because
the numbers I am seeing for a depth-first puzzle solver are so large
(e.g., 250MB) that I can't believe my workstation wouldn't crash if it
really meant that the program used that much space.
	My apologies for the elementary nature of this question. :-j

---

From: Samir Barjoud <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Oct 1999 17:41:11 -0400

> 	My apologies for the elementary nature of this question. :-j

From:

http://www.harlequin.com/education/books/HyperSpec/Body/mac_time.html

:time prints various timing data and other information to
:*trace-output*. The nature and format of the printed
:information is _implementation-defined_. Implementations are
:encouraged to provide such information as elapsed real time, machine
:run time, and storage management statistics.

Whenever something is implementation defined, you must look to the
lisp implementation's implementation specific documentation.
For CLISP, that means the file "impnotes.txt" or "impnotes.html".

>From impnotes.html

:The timing data printed by the macro time includes: The real time
:(elapsed time), the run time (processor time for this process), the
:number of bytes allocated (use the space macro for more detailed
:analysis), and the number of GCs performed, if any.

The 250MB allocated by the puzzle solver is memory allocated (and
implicitly released by garbage collection) throughout its execution.

-- 
Samir Barjoud
[email-masked]