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,b307bd75c8071241 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) Subject: Re: newbie Q: storage management Date: 1997/05/06 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 239921574 References: <5k5hif$7r5@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> <336E15A4.167E@magellan.bgm.link.com> Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-05-06T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , Robert Dewar wrote: >In other words, the really strong argument for a GC annex would be if >you now saw a situation in which lots of Ada 95 vendors were rushing to >implement GC in an incompatible manner. I don't see that happening yet :-) I agree with Robert here. Look at the Real Time Annex: The idea was that most of the Ada 83 vendors (or at least most of the ones who were going after the real-time market) were providing more-or-less the same functionality, but in incompatible ways. The reason the RT annex was invented, was to encourage compatibility. In general, it is *not* the purpose a language standard to force implementers to produce good products. The purpose is to ensure uniformity across implementations. After all, the whole Ada standard is completely optional -- if you want, you can write a compiler for an Ada-like language that you think is "better" than Ada in some way. Or you can write a compiler for a subset of Ada. The standard doesn't force you to support all the features of Ada -- your customers with money to spend are the ones doing the forcing. So it would be inappropriate, and ineffective, to have a GC Annex that somehow said "Thou shalt have GC" (even if one could produce a precise-enough definition of what it means to "have GC"). The only purpose of a GC annex would be to standardize whatever hooks there are (such as procedures for turning it off and on, specifying how many generations you want, and so forth). But even within the GC community, there are strong disagreements about what such hooks ought to look like -- some people don't like generational GC, so what's that hook supposed to mean? - Bob