Re: Heap Memory Management Question(s)

["jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net>]

Florian Liekweg wrote:
> Sorry for being unclear.  I was thinking of, e.g., a package variable,
> which, as I understand, is not visible and/or accessible everywhere,
> but it exists and keeps its state over the lifetime of the program.
>
> My assumption is the following:
>    We can momentarily leave the area where the variable is /visible/,
>    but it stays in existence.  The lifetime of the object it points to
>    can now span the entire program, not just the time the variable is
>    visible.
> My conclusion is: Visibility of the access type doesn't help when it
>    comes to determining the lifetime of that object.  NB, it could
>    of course /improve/ whatever analysis a sophisticated compiler
>    might do.

You might want to read the "Ada Distilled" article by Richard Riehle.
It is available several places online.

Ada Distilled has a good discussion of how Ada makes a distinction
between scope and visibility. Richard argues that understanding this
distinction is critical to understanding Ada.

Another point to understand about Ada is that the language
design reduces the need to use access types compared to Java,
C++, or C#.

Jim Rogers