From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,3ccb707f4c91a5f2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Dave Subject: Re: Java vs Ada 95 (Was Re: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation) Date: 1996/10/12 Message-ID: <326003FC.2038@gte.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 189021563 references: <325BC3B3.41C6@hso.link.com> <325D7F9B.2A8B@gte.net> <325E452E.265C@gsfc.nasa.gov> <325E9110.1D16@gte.net> cc: davedave@io.com content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: GTE Intelligent Network Services, GTE INS mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada x-mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win95; I) Date: 1996-10-12T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote: > > First, you are wrong, completely! I have no idea what garbage reduction > might be, but in any case, the Ada language is neutral wrt garbage collection, > as, for that matter, is Java from a formal point of view. You are correct: See my reply to Jon Anthony's post. Garbage reduction works like this: When a type goes out of scope, all instances of that type are deleted. > The whole point > of gc is that it has no semantics, it is transparent! > Actually, Ada95 provides a pragma (pragma Controlled) to turn off garbage collection. If the programmer can turn garbage collection on or off it is transparent only if the programmer wants it to be. > Garbage > collection has never made it into a mainstream language before for all > sorts of reasons, but it seems quite possible that java will change this. Perhaps you wouldn't, but I would consider Lisp and Smalltalk to be mainstream languages. In fact, I would guess that Smalltalk is at least as popular as Ada -- perhaps more so. -- Dave Jones