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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,3ccb707f4c91a5f2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Java vs Ada 95 (Was Re: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation) Date: 1996/10/14 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 189491805 references: <325BC3B3.41C6@hso.link.com> <325D7F9B.2A8B@gte.net> <325FF8D0.6660@io.com> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-10-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Jon Anthony said "I've seen you mention this before. It is depressing. Putting it in an annex of its own would probably have been even nicer (and from what you say, even less likely). Really. This is a pretty sad and incomprehensible story." Not incomprehensible at all, it just means the world does not agree with you, or at least the world of people involved and interested in the Ada 95 design. When I argue for something, and everyone else disagrees, I don't go around mumbling "sad and incomprehensible", I just figure I was wrong! In this particular case, the feeling was that including GC in the IS annex would make the annex too difficult to implement, which, since it is optional, might be counter productive. There could have been an annex for GC, but no one was interested enough to suggest that, and if they had, I don't think it would have interested people enough to survive. Just because you want something in Ada and not many other people do does not mean the majority is wrong and you are right :-) Now, as I have noted before, I think Java may change people's attitude towards GC (in fact I think this is really the only interesting thing about Java that is really new). Note that in saying from a formal point of view that whether a language does or does not have GC, we are being a little too pedantic in one important respect. If you have a language like Algol-68 or (as far as I know, I am not an expert) Java, that has no way of explicitly freeing storage, then from a practical point of view, you have no way of implementing the language (assuming it does have dynmaic allocation explicitly or implicitly, without using garbage collection). To get a feel for the orginal intent in Ada (which was that typical implementations would have GC), note that although NEW is clearly a first class citizen in Ada, and is introduced early on in the RM, the corresponding FREE operation is buried in chapter 13 and given a disparaging name (unchecked_deallocation). Just as the thought was that most programs would not need to use unchecked conversion, the thought was that most programs would not need to use unchecked deallocatoin, because GC would be there. Well maybe this is a little overreaching :-) dp