Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length

[fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)]

kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes:

>fjh@murlibobo.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes:
>
>> Certainly there is plenty of disagreement about whether or not GC
>> should be provided.  But it's not clear to me that you couldn't achieve
>> concensus about a minimal portable API for GC, for those
>> implementations that do provide it.  What makes you think this would be
>> so hard?
>
>I thought the Ada design allowed Garbage Collection to "just work"
>without any changes to the source code. Why would one need an API ?

There's a couple of reasons.  The main one is that since Ada supports
interfacing to C and other languages, you need to know how GC interacts
with multi-language programming.  The API needs to specify that.
(A minimal portable API wouldn't give a programmer many guarantees here,
but as always, implementations would be free to guarantee more than the
standard.)

For some applications it is important to be able to exercise some
fine-grained control of garbage collection, and so it may be desirable
for the API to provide ways to explicitly request a full or partial
garbage collection, or to temporarily disable collection.  It may also
be desirable for a program to be able to specify that it requires
garbage collection, or to request incremental collection, perhaps via a
configuration pragma. Other potentially desirable functionality
includes weak pointers and finalizers, although such features would be
harder to standardize. 

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.