From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5997b4b7b514f689 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) Subject: Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length Date: 1997/03/04 Message-ID: <5fg5gm$162@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 222913847 References: <5ds40o$rpo@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <33032AE2.666F@mds.lmco.com> <33037A74.44AF@mds.lmco.com> <3304D791.489C@acm.org> <5fdu5d$hn5@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <1997Mar3.082830.1@eisner> Organization: Comp Sci, University of Melbourne Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes: >fjh@murlibobo.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes: > >> Certainly there is plenty of disagreement about whether or not GC >> should be provided. But it's not clear to me that you couldn't achieve >> concensus about a minimal portable API for GC, for those >> implementations that do provide it. What makes you think this would be >> so hard? > >I thought the Ada design allowed Garbage Collection to "just work" >without any changes to the source code. Why would one need an API ? There's a couple of reasons. The main one is that since Ada supports interfacing to C and other languages, you need to know how GC interacts with multi-language programming. The API needs to specify that. (A minimal portable API wouldn't give a programmer many guarantees here, but as always, implementations would be free to guarantee more than the standard.) For some applications it is important to be able to exercise some fine-grained control of garbage collection, and so it may be desirable for the API to provide ways to explicitly request a full or partial garbage collection, or to temporarily disable collection. It may also be desirable for a program to be able to specify that it requires garbage collection, or to request incremental collection, perhaps via a configuration pragma. Other potentially desirable functionality includes weak pointers and finalizers, although such features would be harder to standardize. -- Fergus Henderson | "I have always known that the pursuit WWW: | of excellence is a lethal habit" PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3 | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.