Re: Memory management clarification

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

"Frank J. Lhota" <NOSPAM.lhota@adarose.com> writes:

> Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Trying to learn a bit of Ada I came across a statement that memory
> > allocated from the pool will be implicitly reclaimed when the acces
> > variable used to reference it goes out of scope.
> 
> No, that is not true. What is true is that if an access type goes out of
> scope, then the data allocated from the pool for that type will be
> reclaimed. See ARM 13.11 (18).

That's not quite true, either.  Most implementations use a global heap
by default, and never automatically reclaim memory.  If you use a
Storage_Size clause on a local access type, then what you say is true.
But local access types are not very useful.

> Most Ada implementations do not support garbage collection, and with
> such implementations, your examples would simply create a lot of garbage.

Right.

- Bob