Re: pointers and pointers.

[Larry Hazel <lhazel@mindspring.com>]

You can always have an internal linked list of unused, available elements. 
Then, deallocation consists of placing the element in the list.  Whenever you
need a new element, get it from the internal list and only allocate a new
element when the internal list is empty.

Singlespeeder wrote:
> 
> >
> > Any text book on Ada will have lots of examples of the use
> > of access types. That is where you should look.
> 
> I think you'll find that most text books use the linked list example, but
> completely fail to mention how you should deallocate the memory grabbed by
> the new operator when you remove the item from the list. I've had lists that
> grow to 40MB before I empty them, so I want to be sure that the memory is
> being deallocated properly. Do I have to use an unchecked_deallocation to do
> this or is there a neater (better) way?
> 
> Any expansion on this vague topic over and above what the text books say
> would be gladly received, because quite frankly most of them give rise to
> more FAQs than they answer.
> 
> I learnt what I know (which isn't a lot) by looking at the source examples
> for the GNAT implementation of the unbounded_strings and generic queue.
> 
> Any explanations in Ada 83 terms rather than Ada 95 would be preferred by
> me.
> 
> Nick
> singlespeeder@32sixteen.com

-- 
Larry Hazel