Re: Unchecked_Deallocation with tagged types

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 4/20/21 11:10 PM, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> On 2021-04-20 23:32, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>> On 4/20/21 8:53 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>>>
>>> 'Free makes more sense in a new language (an Ada follow-on).
>>
>> Right. I don't think it would be a good idea to add it to Ada.
>>
>> But I think a new language should not have pointers at all.
>>
>> No more radical than not having arrays.
> 
> 
> It seems to me that a language without arrays and pointers would be very 
> difficult to use in an embedded, real-time, close-to-HW context. So we would 
> lose the nice wide-spectrum nature of Ada.

I don't see that pointers are needed for such S/W.

Brukardt has recently been discussing the idea that a high-level language such 
as Ada should not have arrays, which is why I referenced it. Such a language 
might not be convenient for such systems.

But the idea is that arrays are a low-level implementation feature that are 
usually used to implement higher-level abstractions, such as sequences and maps. 
A language without arrays would have direct support for such abstractions. My 
experience is that most uses of arrays in embedded, real-time S/W are also for 
such abstractions, so it would probably not be too great a problem.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Monsieur Arthur King, who has the brain of a duck, you know."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
09