Re: Deallocating Task objects

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

<<It was not declared erroneous in Ada 83.  The ARG defined a new AI
category, "pathological", which said that the question at hand had
nothing to do with anything that could ever be useful in a real program,
and that even if the language gave a definite answer to the question, it
was not useful to write an ACVC test that would force implementors to
degrade their code to conform to that answer.  The later AI simply
reclassified the earlier AI from "binding interpretation" to
"pathological", meaning "Yes, a terminated task can be returned outside
of its master, but it's utterly useless to write a program that does
this, so we don't care if it works right, and we don't want implementors
degrading their implementations to make it work right.">>

said Norman. Right, that's my memory too, note that the really important
idea behind the pathological categorization was to stop the ACVC folks
from generating a test. It was really the ACVC test that damaged the
implementations in this case, not the original ARG ruling itself.

These days, with the new usage oriented viewpoint of the ACVC, such a test
would be unlikely to see the light of day even if the situation had not
been fixed in Ada 95 :-)