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From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: Garbage Collection in Ada
Date: 1996/10/25
Message-ID: <JSA.96Oct25141553@alexandria>#1/1
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sender: news@organon.com (news)
references: <01bbb910$f1e73f60$829d6482@joy.ericsson.se>
organization: Organon Motives, Inc.
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-25T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <32701284.167E@mti.sgi.com> Hans-Juergen Boehm <boehm@mti.sgi.com> writes:

Lots of good stuff about why Robert Eachus' "theory of conservative GC" is
so far in the weeds you would have trouble finding it with the Space
Telescope.

For me, the most salient points are:

> I've routinely run fairly long running applications with more than that
> on 32-bit machines.  So have a number of other readers, I suspect.

and

> Please try it for yourself.  Until April I was reading my mail on a
> conservatively garbage collected system that couldn't possibly have
> stayed up for weeks by this chain of reasoning.  (It did.)  Many other
> systems that are in routine use couldn't possibly work either.

Exactly.  The "theory" just doesn't account for the observed facts.
Hence, anyone who is even remotely "scientifically motivated" would
have to just toss it on the incorrect theory junk pile.  While the
"science" in "computer science" has always struck me as dubious (at
best), one would hope that there would be at least _some_ adherence to
this basic principle.

/Jon

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