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Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 13:08:37 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: memory leakages with Ada?
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Date: 2002-03-15T13:08:37-05:00
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Kevin Cline wrote:
> So dynamic memory allocation is no problem in Ada because "we just don't
> do that?"  That's fine for embedded applications, but the users of desktop
> applications expect them to consume memory proprotional to the data
> set size.  They aren't too happy with messages like "sorry, file too large,
> please increase DATA_FILE.MAX_SIZE and recompile."

That's not what he said. In Ada you can declare arrays whose size
depends on expressions evaluated at runtime, whereas in C89/C++
(but not C99) array sizes must be constant expressions. Therefore
situations which call for buffers whose size depends on some
external value can be handled cleanly in Ada by just reading that
external value and using it to declare an array whose size depends
on it. If you actually need to store these variably-sized objects
then of course you will need dynamic allocation, but often you
just need to read an object, process it, and dispose of it, and
then you can sometimes avoid the allocation.