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: 103376,2925b133078d1557 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Flexible Strings (was Equality operator...) Date: 1997/05/03 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 239106823 References: <9704301422.AA07755@most> <3F2AA8DEC61418AE.502E81A8ECA1C4E7.3A25DE2FB38755A4@library-proxy.airnews.net> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-05-03T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Kevin Cline said <> 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.