Re: Newbie question -- dereferencing access

["Alex R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com>]

Tim Rowe wrote:

> Ed Falis wrote:
>> Try the books on this page: http://www.adaic.org/free/freebook.html
>> 
>> Richard Riehle's "Ada Distilled" may be exactly what you're looking for,
>> as it's aimed at experienced programmers.
> 
> Thanks. I am now working through "Ada Distilled". I'm a little nervous
> that it says "very little about Ada.Finalization, Storage Pool
> Management [...]" -- I hope the "very little" it says is enough for me
> to be able to use access types without memory leaks! I suppose I'll find
> out when I get there.

While these are certainly important skills, one thing you should notice when 
transitioning to Ada is a decreased need for access types thanks to 
unconstrained/indefinite types. I'd think that would mean that you're in the 
right track.

It can depend on your particular application domain, of course.

Anyway, if you have a sound knowledge of memory management in C/C++, it's 
pretty much the same. Don't forget to deallocate, wrap it all in a 
controlled type. Storage pools are quite exotic a need in my experience, 
specially for a newbie (with the possible exception of Gnat.Debug_Pools, and 
for that you only need the very basics).