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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: memory management
Date: 26 May 2005 08:10:40 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2005-05-26T08:10:40-04:00
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alex goldman <hello@spamm.er> writes:

> As I understood from reading the Ada tutorial for C/C++ programmers,
> "access" is essentially like C++ smart pointer,

No, Ada access types are just pointers -- no "smarts".
To make something like smart pointers, you can use
controlled types.

>... except that you don't need
> to do anything to dereference it.

Dereference of access types uses the syntax ".all", but it's allowed to
be implicit in most contexts (for example, X.Y means X.all.Y, if X
is an access value (pointer)).

> How will the following work:
> 
> Record A contains "access" to record B; 
> record B contains "access" to record A.
> 
> If I create an instance of one of them with "new", will it be destroyed when
> "access" to it goes out of scope?

No.

- Bob