Re: Collective response to := messa

[ron@inmet.UUCP]

Garbage collection certainly does not come for free, but it is extremely
useful.  It frees the programmer from the need to repeatedly write
sophisticated ADT deallocate routines and to deal with the potentially
massive book-keeping requirements for determining whether an object is in
fact garbage.  In general, lack of GC forces a programmer to invest a lot of
effort addressing issues that are not fundamentally related to the problem
domain.  My experience has also shown that problems of "slow heap leakage"
are among the hardest errors to correct.

An earlier posting claimed that a programmer should know what is and isn't
garbage, and that GC is therefore not needed.  This argument would never be
made by a programmer with experience writing serious applications using both
GC'd and non-GC'd languages.  It's quite possible that those without GC'd
programming experience don't even recognize the additional burden for what
it is.

I am not saying that garbage collection should or shouldn't be added to Ada.
I haven't really thought about all of the issues; there are clearly pros and
cons.  However, the argument against GC loses much of its credibility if
it contains an outright denial of the many positive aspects of GC.