🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <599@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> wright@hsi.com (Gary Wright) writes:
>In article <62342@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Golden Richard <grichard@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:
>>In article <909@scaup.cl.cam.ac.uk> scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley) writes:
>>[pro-GC arguments deleted]
>
>Well, I have *never* encountered a situation that absolutely demanded using
>a high level language.   That is why I still do all my programming in
>assembly. :-)
>
>If our criteria for deciding whether GC is better than explicit memory
>management is based on absolutes, we will never come to a conclusion.
>

I never intended to sound as if I were daring someone to come up with an
application which I couldn't handle with programmer-managed reclamation.
The "absolutely demanded" phrase in my article was prompted by references
to (unnamed) applications which supposedly require GC to ease the burden
on the programmer.

To rephrase my statement, I have never encountered an application where
GC was necessarily preferable to programmer-managed reclamation.
Furthermore, I can't imagine a properly designed application where
storage management is so complicated that the usual techniques for 
programmer-managed storage reclamation aren't adequate.   If the
programmer can't define when a certain object can go poof, I suspect
a serious lack of understanding of the problem at hand.







-=-
Golden Richard III        OSU Department of Computer and Information Science
grichard@cis.ohio-state.edu         "I'm absolutely positive!  ...or not."