🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov4.031026.23624@linus.mitre.org>
crawford@boole.mitre.org (Randy Crawford) writes:
>The nice thing about C's low level programming support is that you
>don't have to tolerate the imposition and girth of a garbage collector
>(something that belongs in a library anyway).  If you really want one,
>once again, C will let you roll your own.

	No it won't.  There is no way [provided by C -- an individual
compiler or system may add one, of course] of finding out whether some
object is being pointed at, so there is no way of determining which
objects are "dead".  There is no way of "compacting" live storage, and
shifting all pointers to correspond.  For specific applications, you can
rig up versions of "malloc" and "free" to do this, but not in general.

	In languages that *do* provide proper garbage collection, it
is usually included only if your program includes constructs that
might cause it to be invoked -- in C terms, it might be a library
procedure that was called by "malloc" -- which gets round your objection
to its "imposition and girth" [whatever that means!].

>If you want run-time error checking, then C is the wrong choice of
>programming language for a lot of better reasons than array bounds
>checking.

	Why?  I quite like C, and it wouldn't make it any worse as a
language if there was at least a compiler option [as indeed there is
for *some* compilers] for array bound checking, pointer validity
checking, etc.

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk