Re: "new" word

[Adrien Plisson <aplisson-news@stochastique.net>]

fabio de francesco wrote:
> Ciao,
> 
> While reading "the big online book of Linux Ada programming", by Ken O.
> Burtch, I stopped at the following assertion
> (http://www.pegasoft.ca/resources/boblap/13.html):
> 
> "Usually you allocate memory with the Ada new statement. Where does new
> get its memory? It uses the standard C library's malloc function."

it does not seem entirely true...

if i understand the ARM correctly (ARM95 - 13.11 Storage Management), 
the new statement gets its memory from a storage pool. if you don't 
define your own storage pool for an access type, the implementation 
will provide a default standard storage pool.

so it should be the standard storage pool which uses the standard C 
library's malloc function.

> Does really Ada use Libc to implement "new"? Is it true?
> 
> It seems absurd to me. I don't understand why Ada should depend on a C
> standard library. 

not totally absurd. Linux has been developped in C, so system 
interfaces are provided in C. be it the standard C library or the 
system programming interface, your Ada runtime would have used C anyway.

also note that it is this particular implementation of Ada which does 
that. the ARM does NOT define anything in term of the C standard 
library, so each implementation uses what fit best.

-- 
rien