Re: Does memory leak?

[jbaker@thor.tu.hac.com (John Baker)]

Henry Baker (hbaker@netcom.com) wrote:
: In article <3l6gf6$h05@theopolis.orl.mmc.com>, Theodore Dennison
: <dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com> wrote:

: > Perhaps I'm missing something here...what exactly is wrong with using 
: > UNCHECKED_DEALLOCATION?
: > 
: > I mean, if you don't deallocate what you allocate, your program will
: > leak memory no matter what language it is written in. This isn't an Ada
: > issue, it's an issue of sloppy coding.

: Not necessarily true.  I've written lots and lots of Lisp programs, and
: I think that I forgot to deallocate in almost all of them.  They worked
: just fine.

: (Of course I'm being facetious.  Lisp doesn't have a deallocate primitive,
: because it has an automatic garbage collector, just like Modula and Eiffel.
: Furthermore, garbage collection can't collect stuff that is still linked
: to live objects, so you can still get a 'leak' this way.)

The Lisp i programmed in (symbolics) had a really nice feature --
allocation to *named* areas of memory.  You could allocate
objects with differing life spans in different areas and then
(at the appropriate time), wipe a whole named area and start over
without having to destroy the objects individually.  Very fast
and easy to control.  I'd like to see a feature like that in C++
and ADA.

JB