Re: Flexible Strings (was Equality operator...)

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <E9sAq2.HE8@world.std.com> bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) writes:

  > Of course, I admit that the C standard is easier to understand on this
  > particular point, if you're just a programmer trying to write programs,
  > and not a language lawyer.  The Ada standard goes out of its way to
  > raise questions of this nature, unfortunately.  Nonetheless, I claim
  > that the requirements of C and Ada are identical with respect to whether
  > free/Unch_Dealloc must/should reclaim storage.  They're just written in
  > a different style.

   The three reasons that the Ada standard doesn't always require
deallocation to do anything are finalization, storage pools, and
tasking.  It is easy to say, that Ada should require that storage is
always freed, but if you free a running task, or an object whose
finialization never completes, or an object in a storage pool with a
user supplied Deallocate procedure, the standard can't require
immediate deallocation.

   In all other cases, as I read 13.11.2(10) the wording is pretty
similar to the C standard.  And of course the three exceptions above
are not that likely to disturb anyone in real programs.  (Unless the
actual behavior of the Deallocate or Finalize routine involved is due
to a bug, not design.)


--

					Robert I. Eachus

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