Re: Java vs Ada 95 (Was Re: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <dewar.845162841@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> GC. During the Ada 95 development effort I made the suggestion that
> we at least "require" GC for the information systems annex, but
> other people found this laughably unrealistic, and there was zero
> support inside and outside the Ada 9X design group, DR's and ISO for

I've seen you mention this before.  It is depressing.  Putting it in
an annex of its own would probably have been even nicer (and from what
you say, even less likely).  Really.  This is a pretty sad and
incomprehensible story.


> such a step. Note of course that Ada 95 certainly *permits* garbage
> collection, and the design was carefully carried out to ensure that
> this is the case, but there was no sympathy for trying to require it
> (the requirement of course would be a somewhat wooly one, since GC
> is not something you can specify formally, but there are plenty of
> other wooly requirements like this already.

Just the sort of thing that would have fit in an annex rather nicely.
Implementations that supported it could have said they support Annex
such-and-such and everyone would have had a reasonably good idea of
what it meant and required.  Those that didn't want it, could simply
not use it - or even get implementations that did not provide it.


> 4. There are some worrisome interactions between garbage collection and
> finalization that have to be sorted out, and between garbage collection
> and other features, such as ATC.

Yes, this is definitely an issue...

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com