Really more GC talk (was: Reading a line of arbitrary length)

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <5flm4e$ngl@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>, fjh@murlibobo.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes:
> kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
> 
>>It seems to me that by omission the Ada 95 (or 83, for that matter)
>>reference manual establishes that the "defined standard minimal interface"
>>is one without programmer control or API.  Anything on top of that is
>>implementation-specific.
> 
> Well, by omission it also implies that only conservative garbage
> collection can be used -- or at least that memory areas used by the
> foreign language interface must be conservatively scanned.  This is a
> potentially undesirable constaint to place on implementations.

No, it implies that only conservative garbage collection is standardized.
Someone else talked about ongoing garbage collection "research", making
me think that it is not ready for inclusion in an Ada standard.

If someone wanted to have Ada non-conservative garbage collection
implementations confirm to some Posix (or other) standard API for
garbage collection, that would be fine, but it seems foolish for
Ada folk to be leading the way for such standards given that the
experience is all in other languages.

Larry Kilgallen