List Commands Library for 50g

[DavidM]

(09-24-2017 01:43 PM)snrowe Wrote:  When researching how to free up memory when manipulating large lists I learned the following. When you extract even one element from a list that has not been stored to a variable it keeps the entire list in memory as long as the extracted element is on the stack. ... Was hoping there might be a way to explode a list into individual elements while destroying the original list so it's not taking up memory while your exploding it.

The UserRPL command NEWOB will help you out in this situation. After extracting the list element, simply execute NEWOB on the object. This actually creates a separate version of the individual object in TEMP, drops the pointer to the embedded one, and replaces it with a pointer to the new one. So long as there are no other references to the list hanging around, the next GC will destroy the list.

Note that this only helps after the extractions have been done; there's no way to have the system discard part of a list while you are still in the middle of an extraction.

Depending on what your code is doing, you may find that you have to force the system to clear out the references that it saves in order to free the memory. One easy way to do this is to simply execute "0 DROP". This won't help if you still have any other references to the original list on the stack, though.