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

[Erik Magnuson <erik@fl.ensco.com>]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> BUT, does this matter in practice? Of course not, all Ada compilers always
> have followed this advice for the standard storage pool, and it would be
> surprising if it were otherwise. This is exactly the same situation as
> observing that all C compilers actualy free storage when free is used.
> 
> Is it possible to make a formally conforming implementation in which
> unchecked deallocation is useless. Most certainly. It is also possible
> to make a formally conforming impl,ementation in which all integr
> additions take one hour to complete. Bothy implementations are formally
> correct according to the standard, both are totally useless!

Robert, your claim is a little broad here. I have used 2 different Ada 83
compilers runtimes for embedded targets that did NOT implement any storage
reclamation for Unchecked_Conversion, i.e., UC simply set the pointer to
null. (One of these was the small runtime from a company you used to work
with!) Now, both of these compilers also had versions that supported
reclaiming storage. But for small, embedded systems, it is often nice to
have a simple "new" that you can use at startup without including any
overhead for UC. If you believe that these compilers were useless, you had
better not fly on any modern commercial airliner.

-- 
Erik