Storage Management

Rudimentary storage allocator using the Stack data structure. Section 5.4 of The C Programming Language.

About the project:

• alloc(n) returns a pointer p to n consecutive character positions which can be used by the caller of alloc for storing characters.
• afree(p) releases the storage thus acquired so it can be reused later.
• The routines are "redimentary" because the calls to afree must be made in the opposite order to the calls made on alloc.
• The storage managed by alloc and afree is a Stack.

How allocbuf is used:

• We use a pointer called allocp that points to the next free element.
• When alloc is asked for n characters, it checks to see if there is enough room left in allocbuf. If so, alloc returns the currect value of allocp (the beginning of the free block), then increments it by n to point to the next free area.
• If there is no room, alloc returns zero.
• afree(p) merely sets allocp to p if p if inside allocbuf.

What did I learn from this:

• Arrays with pointers in C.
• Pointer arithmetics and comparison.