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: 103376,3498dd887729ed19 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Garbage Collection in Ada Date: 1996/10/16 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 189823915 references: <01bbb910$f1e73f60$829d6482@joy.ericsson.se> <1996Oct16.080524.1@corning.com> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-10-16T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Matt said "Time to admit my ignorance (and hopefully remove it!). What is a "fat" pointer? From the context, sounds like it might be a data structure that not only references memory, but also provides the size of the memory being reference (kind of like a VMS descriptor, if memory serves)." Well I would not call it ignorance, since this is certainly not a recognized technical term. In fact I can't even remember if GNAT invented it or not, I suspect we did. We use it simply to mean, as you say, a pointer with other information. For example, in GNAT, the default (but overridable) form of pointers to unconstrained arrays is a structure with two pointers, one to the data (which could be, but is not yet, a virtual origin), and one a pointer to a record containing the array bounds.