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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Equality operator overloading in ADA 83
Date: 1997/04/27
Message-ID: <dewar.862142192@merv>#1/1
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References: <01bc4e9b$ac0e7fa0$72041dc2@lightning> <E93v9n.FDH@world.std.com>
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 <JSA.97Apr25145343@alexandria>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-04-27T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


<<I strongly agree with this.  Of course (as you all know by now) I
would go further and say that GC is really the only good solution
here.  Even if it were only for strings.  Finalization and user
defined assignment are typically going to be rather more expensive.>>

That's certainly true, but there are distributed costs for GC, (e.g.
restrictions on what pragma Interface can do), so there is a balance
here. One of the reasons that Java can more easily introduce GC is
that it is a much more closed environment than Ada or C++ (just wait
till people start mixing Java and C with the interfacing capability,
wild pointers are a menace in C, but they really get to be fun when
they mess up the GC structures, and show up as mysterious malfunctions
after a few garbage collections :-)

So there is a trade off here.

What I think would be a nice compromise is to have a storage pool specially
for unbounded strings (or similar gizmos) where you got GC in that storage
pool -- something to keep looking at ...