Re: Type safety on wikipedia

[Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net>]

Simon Wright wrote:

> "Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com> writes:
> 
>> Simon Wright wrote:
>>> "Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com> writes:
>>> 
>>>>This is something I've mused about sometimes: Let's suppose some Ada
>>>>compiler goes ahead and provides a GC. What happens with programs
>>>>written without taking this into account?
>>> 13.11.2(17) only says that Free _should_ reclaim the storage. I
>>> suppose for a GC implementation there could be at least 2
>>> implementation strategies:
>>>  * don't actually reclaim, just remove local reference and deal with
>>>    tasks if necessary
>>>  * check that the reference count is in fact 1 and raise *_Error if
>>>    not! That would be useful!
>>
>> Neat! I hadn't figured that path of action. Indeed it seems a very
>> good strategy. I can imagine unknown bugs popping out after years of
>> silently wait and rare crashes... hehe...
> 
> One point I had forgotten is that deallocation of a controlled object
> will finalize it -- LRM 13.11.2(9) -- so looking at it through a
> dangling pointer will be a Bad Thing even if GC has ensured that the
> mamory hasn't been re-used for something else.

Damm - so I have to leave everything as it is.

Martin
-- 
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Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com