I just experimented a bit... In principle PD handles the lots of symbols quite well (i generated about 3000000 different ones), but naturally symbol retrieval becomes slow then. In one occasion PD crashed but this seems to be attributable to Win2K (which was non-responsive afterwards). The size of the symbol hashtable is only 1024 by default, it should be increased in cases with many symbols.
Btw. (as i now understand how gensym works...) it seems to be fairly easy to include a function into pd that frees a symbol. The only difficulty is what to do with the s_thing pointer attached to a symbol? Free its memory as well or not?
greetings, Thomas
And, on the other hand, is it possible to free symbol
definitions from the
symbol space?
gensym("") +?
could you explain? "" is already there, in the first slot of the hashtable. It is generated in mess_init(), and used as a
null' symbol referenced by
s_' (otherwise you seem to be right) --have not looked at pd very. may be.
as recall pd. max. etc experience problems when too many symbols are generated. true +?