Re: Requesting a larger stack using Ocaml.

You'll want to look into tail recursion so that you can get the compiler to rewrite your recursive definitions as a loop on your behalf. Tail recursion is a way to eliminate the need to allocate additional stack space. You can read about it from the relevant online literature. 

    On Friday, April 8, 2016 1:35 PM, "Douglas Lewit [email protected] [ocaml_beginners]" <[email protected]> wrote:
 

     Hi,
I often invoke Java's compiler from the command line in Terminal.  If I'm implementing a Java program with a lot of heavy recursion in it, I can apply the -Xss option to request more stack memory.  The default stack size for Java is usually 500 Kb of RAM.  But this can be changed by using that option.  For example:
java -Xss4m Fibonacci
Then my Fibonacci java program will have a larger than normal stack.  Rather than the default of 0.5 megs, now the program can use 4 megs of memory.  That's great!  The Java user has the option of increasing the size of the stack.
I've been playing around with a lot of recursion on lists in Ocaml.  And normally Ocaml handles recursion very nicely and very quickly.  But there are exceptions.  I created this one function where I add up the float values in an approximation of the unit probability function defined on [0, 1].  Then I add up the values and divide by the number of values to get the average.  ( Ideally the average is 0.5, but that's only if you use an infinitely long list of values from that distribution. )  Then I put the averages into another list.  If I'm requesting about 100,000 such values, there's no problem.  But for 1,000,000 values Ocaml returns a warning message about a possible looping recursion!  My function does indeed work for values around 100,000, so my program logic is correct.  But it seems that Ocaml's stack blows up if I want to create a list with a million of those floating point values in it.  So is there some command line option that I can use to tell Ocaml's compiler ( and interpreter ) that I want to use a larger stack?
Thanks for the feedback.
Best,
Douglas.
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