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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Running a preprocessor from GPS?
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 13:55:58 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2015-07-30T13:55:58-05:00
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"EGarrulo" <egarrulo@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:a10c8bc6-d5de-4b36-a15b-dd830c92c75b@googlegroups.com...
...
>
>> In Ada, use the stack, if possible!
>> In Ada 2005, use containers, if possible!
>
> Otherwise use C++ and its "shared/weak pointer" support ;)

We had a proposal for adding that to Ada, and it just was a complete mess. 
We simplified it to the basic subpool mechanism, which is a lot easier to 
understand and use (if not quite as safe, since it relies on the programmer 
to get the details right).

But seriously, if you can't use the stack and/or containers in Ada 2005 and 
later, you're already into a fairly unlikely problem. And then you can use 
one of the various "smart pointer" packages out there; those do reference 
counting and hide that behind the various syntax sugar techniques of Ada 
2012. (See Christophe Grein's package, for example.) There's an argument 
that one of those packages should get added to the Ada.Containers hierarchy 
(someone should propose that on Ada-Comment).

Anyway, unless you are implementing a container, the need to use access 
types directly (and thus do the storage management directly) is pretty rare. 
And if you are implementing a container, you can limit the management to 
that container (thus taking the problem out of the hands of clients).

                                     Randy.