From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,b99897135d6631cc X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 12:20:17 -0500 Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 13:20:16 -0400 From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: memory management and productivity References: <40d69121$1_1@baen1673807.greenlnk.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.147.90.114 X-Trace: sv3-OKh75quNxRfVHqxDjIHZEreglJ7I7Cv+ll+s+hlUMEDbmkCCXor2hYH3IjKrT3FRKn86OQqP3L53J5q!o0Q0FfTFOK0FDZK9FYxFfV1Zac3JiRyeWYDbZoD4vo3Ei/yDl/4TT4EK7U3bMQ== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1931 Date: 2004-06-26T13:20:16-04:00 List-Id: Russ wrote: > I don't know much about memory management or garbage collection, but I > do know that it is considered a great benefit of Java and many other > languages. Whatever Ada provides in this regard should be optional at > the discretion of the *developer* (not the compiler vendor), and it > should be at least as good as the GC in Java for those who choose to > use it that way... > I think you are missing a huge point here. The advantages of automatic > memory management are that it is (1) convenient for the developer and > (2) much more reliable, just as the automatic array bounds checking is > more reliable than a developer's hand-rolled bounds checking. > > You may neither want or need it for your application, and you > shouldn't be forced to use it, but the desktop and web developers > should always have it available if they want it. They shouldn't be > denied a valuable feature just because you don't want it. I think you are just not hearing what is being said. Let me try saying it this way. 1) Garbage collection is of great benefit in many languages. 2) Automatic memory management is a big advantage for some programmmers and some programs. So far, so good. But... 3) Ada programmers like the automatic memory management that is a part of Ada, and don't particularly care for garbage collection. Is the memory management that is part of Ada perfect for all applications? No, in fact there are many AI algorithms that work better in a garbage collection environment. Personally I would accept the slight extra work of implementing such an algorithm in Ada using controlled objects rather than use Java or Lisp. But that is because the cost of doing the memory management that way is to me much, much smaller than the debugging advantages of using Ada. Of course, I also get predictable timing by using Ada. YMMV. -- Robert I. Eachus "Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles." -- George Washington