Re: memory leakages with Ada?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Never said that. Please re-read my prior post and note that I made mention
of using dynamic allocation in linked data structures. Sure, when you build
a workstation app that deals with some collection of data that varies
considerably, you'd put it into a linked list or a map or a tree or whatever
that you build from dynamic memory. But generally that limits the creation &
destruction of memory chunks to some limited portion of the code - hopefully
a library that you are reusing over and over so it has become reliable with
respect to not losing memory.

What you typically don't do in Ada that gets done over and over again in C
is to dynamically allocate memory every time you need a variable sized
string or record that you want to pass around to subprograms. Nor do you
typically build libraries that create dynamic data for the caller that the
caller is responsible for deallocating. Nor do you typically create pointers
to everything in sight to hand off to different parts of a program because
parameter passing, function returns, scope/visibility rules, etc. decrease
the need to be handing out the address of something to everyone who thinks
they want it.

Of course Ada programs *do* dynamically allocate memory, but it just isn't
as common as it is in C. Hence leaks are less likely.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Kevin Cline" <kcline@optelnow.net> wrote in message
news:dcfe911f.0203150941.5ebbb85b@posting.google.com...
>
> So dynamic memory allocation is no problem in Ada because "we just don't
> do that?"  That's fine for embedded applications, but the users of desktop
> applications expect them to consume memory proprotional to the data
> set size.  They aren't too happy with messages like "sorry, file too
large,
> please increase DATA_FILE.MAX_SIZE and recompile."