Re: Flexible Strings (was Equality operator...)

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

Kevin Cline said

<<Heap usage is required for programs which solve problems whose size
is unknown and run on machines with unknown memory resources.
Embedded applications don't have these requirements, so dynamic allocation
wasn't interesting to the Ada '83 design team.>>

This is nonsense and in no way reflects reality. Of course the Ada 83
design team recognized the importance of dynamic allocation. This is why
Ada 83 has a full facility for this capability, comparable to that provided
in many other languages (such as C, PL/1, Pascal).

Ada 83 did NOT require garbage collection, but the design went out of its
way to accomodate garbage collection (in strong contrast to the design of
C for example). In fact the designers (and Fisher in particular in his
role as DoD mentor of this project) were hopeful that technology would
be developed to allow the effective use of garbage collection even in
real time programs. 

Ada 83 also did not provide user defined finalization. I really can't 
recall that ever being discussed as a possibility -- perhaps the concept
was not even sufficiently familiar in the late 70's when Ada was designed.

But to say that dynamic allocatoin wasn't interesting to the design team
is just plain wrong.