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

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Dave Jones says

  "Garbage reduction works like this: When a type goes out of scope, all
   instances of that type are deleted."

That of course is familiar, but I never heard the term garbage reduction
applied specifically to this technique. Obviously this technique does
reduce garbage in the informal sense, but do you have a reference for
the specific application of this as a technical term?

  "Actually, Ada95 provides a pragma (pragma Controlled) to turn off garbage
  collection.  If the programmer can turn garbage collection on or off it is
  transparent only if the programmer wants it to be."

You misunderstand the meaning of transparent here. What I mean is that GC has
no effect on the formal semantics. It is not possible to write a program whose
semantics is entirely described by the Ada 95 RM which determines whether or
not garbage collection is in effect

    > Garbage
    > collection has never made it into a mainstream language before for all
    > sorts of reasons, but it seems quite possible
      that java will change this.

  Perhaps you wouldn't, but I would consider Lisp and Smalltalk to be
  mainstream languages. In fact, I would guess that Smalltalk is at least
  as popular as Ada

I was using mainstream to mean languages that have achieved very widespread
use such as Fortran, C and COBOL. I would consider none of the languages you
mention as mainstream in this sense, but Java has a good shot at qualifying!