Re: Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector and GNAT

["Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

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"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> a �crit dans le message de news:vDKsCwFxWhWJ@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> Garbage collection is important to particular problem domains like AI.
> People who need it do not appear to be a significant portion of the
> Ada-using public.

No. Garbage collection is important to particular programming language.
More specifically, if you have a language that does not allow returning objects of
statically unknown size on the stack, then if you need the feature, the "server" will
need to allocate the value (and return a pointer), and the "client" will be responsible
for deallocation. In this case, proper deallocation is generally difficult to do properly,
and having a GC can help.

In Ada, we do return any value on the stack, so this need disappears. As for containers
etc., it is best to hide the (pointer) implementation, and have all collection inside the
container package. You don't need GC for that.

Regarding the initial remark: most people doing AI use these poor languages that
can return only very limited types on the stack; Therefore, they think that GC is
mandatory.

But from personal experience, I was always satisfied with at most finalizable type.

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           J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
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