Was there malloc in 1959? How did they implement the first Lisp interpreter on IBM 704?
Was there malloc in 1959? How did they implement the first Lisp interpreter on IBM 704?
How did they implement allocate a new cons cell?
Free-Storage List. At any given time only a part of the memory reserved for list structures will actually be in use for storing S-expressions. The remaining registers (in our system the number, initially, is approximately 15,000) are arranged in a single list called the free-storage list. A certain register, FREE, in the program contains the location of the first register in this list. When a word is required to form some additional list structure, the first word on the free-storage list is taken and the number in register FREE is changed to become the location of the second word on the free-storage list. No provision need be made for the user to program the return of registers to the free-storage list
Malloc is a C function and wouldn't come around for another 15 years or so. They likely wrote memory allocation code directly in machine code/assembly which could and would just access raw memory directly.
Probably assembly/assembler, but I'm not sure.