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From: Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@mail.earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Ammo-zilla
Date: 1999/10/28
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-10-28T00:00:00+00:00
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I am continually attracted to Ada, however:
The Ada approach to memory management reminds me of the PL/1 approach,
only simplified a bit.  I suppose that you can say that it's better than
C++, but that's *REALLY* faint praise.  There are a lot of details that
I don't fully understand, but this is one of Ada's weaker aspects.  The
second is the syntax used in "object" declaration.  Very clumsy.

Now I *do* understand that the reason for this approach is (partially
the date of design but also) to allow statically linked programs to be
small enough for embedded systems, etc.  And it is indeed necessary to
enable this.  But the cost of a unified design of this nature is that,
e.g., garbage collection is eliminated from the language.  (The syntax
is mainly due to early design.)  I feel relativly certain that if the
language were to be designed today that many things would have been done
differently.

David Botton wrote:

> > Now that's an interesting comment, because to me C++ and Ada
> > are identical in this particular department, can you explain
> > why you think Ada is better wrt memory leaks?
>
> As a result of the excellent design of Ada, I use far more static
> allocation then dynamic resulting in less chance of memory leaks. Of
> course once you start playing with the heap its all about personal
> programmer discipline.
>
> David Botton