Portability of Unchecked Deallocation in Ada

[planck!hercules!westley@cs.buffalo.edu]

I have been studying Booch's _Software_Compenents_with_Ada_ and
wondered why he did not mention use of unchecked deallocation as a
third approach to managing the memory withing a software component
that uses access types.

If you have his book, I'm refering to section 6.3.  For those who
don't, he suggested two approaches to managing the memory:  1) letting
the compiler/run-time system perform garbage collection, and 2) managing
it directly in Ada by using a linked list of free nodes.

My question relates to the use of unchecked deallocation.  Is it a
language requirement that unchecked deallocation work or is this
implementation dependent?  I have used it in Verdix and Telesoft
compilers to successfully manage dynamic memory, but I can't tell
from what the reference manual says as to whether it is required.


Terry J. Westley
Arvin/Calspan Advanced Technology Center
P.O. Box 400, Buffalo, NY 14225
planck!hercules!westley@cs.buffalo.edu