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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Garbage Collection in Ada
Date: 1996/10/15
Message-ID: <EACHUS.96Oct15143310@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 189616866
references: <01bbb910$f1e73f60$829d6482@joy.ericsson.se>
organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-15T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <dewar.845386292@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

  > I am a little dubious about mixing GC with full Ada 95 (e.g. GC and
  > unchecked conversion between integers and pointers are not friends),
  > but certainly GC with a slightly restricted Ada 95 semantics is perfectly
  > practical, and you can add me to the people who would like to see it (but
  > are not willing to sign a big check for it!)

   Adding support for a storage pool that supports GC would probably
be EXTREMELY low cost.  Doesn't GCC already use "fat" pointers under
some circumstances?  All that would be needed is a pragma that
indicates that a certain storage pool uses fat pointers.

   There may be some other way to do it, but I have never needed to
pay the price.  Much easier, when I need it, is to pass "handles" not
pointers, a sleight syntactic misfeature.  So don't add it on my
account.

   However, any Ada compiler that doesn't deallocate memory when you
call Unchecked_Deallocation is junk.  (Well, not really, which is why
the permission is there.  Any compiler that doesn't deallocation
memory that was allocated with `new' when you call....)

--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
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function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...