ANNOUNCE: smart pointers pattern posted to ACM archives

[Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org>]

An article about smart pointers for Ada95 has been posted to the
patterns archive at the ACM.  A description appears below.

<http://www.acm.org/archives/patterns.html>

Last year, I posted an article about the Interpreter pattern, and
implemented the example using (dumb) pointers.  The client had to
manually free the pointers when he was done with them, which often
required some tortuous logic in order to handle storage errors and
prevent memory leaks.

The example has been completely re-written using smart pointers, which
has considerably simplified the implementation, because you don't have
to do any thinking about memory reclamation.  The smart pointers take
care of that for you.

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Smart Pointers

In this article I discuss how to implement "smart pointers," which keep
track of how many references there are to an object, and automatically
return the object to storage when there are no more references.