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- Path: swidir.switch.ch!epflnews!not-for-mail
- From: "Stefan Monnier" <stefan.monnier@lia.di.epfl.ch>
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: Why garbage collection?
- Date: 29 Jan 1996 09:41:36 GMT
- Organization: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
- Message-ID: <4ei4og$la1@info.epfl.ch>
- References: <rvillDL4v3n.I8r@netcom.com> <hbaker-2201961503250001@10.0.2.15> <4eae5s$66p@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <4ecmfo$as9@news2.ios.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: liasg9.epfl.ch
- Originator: monnier@lia.di.epfl.ch (Stefan Monnier)
-
- In article <4ecmfo$as9@news2.ios.com>,
- Vlastimil Adamovsky <vlad@gramercy.ios.com> wrote:
- ] haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de (Bruno Haible) wrote:
- ] >Just look at the technical strength of the argument that GC is not
- ] >"in the tradition of the C community"...
- ] The technical strength of the argument is that C++ is still low level
- ] language with a high level language advantage and as such one it
- ] should do the all low level operations itself and if it is needed, it
- ] should implement the high level features by using its own low level
- ] implementations.
-
- You mean like the virtual table stuff that could be implemented with low-level
- operations but instead is well hidden ? At least well enough to make C++-objects
- very inconvenient to represent any low-level data-structure.
-
- Little example: the vtable can be considered a class-pointer, but C++ has been
- well enough designed to make it impossible for you to explicitely add any kind
- of info to the vtable.
-
- C++ is not low-level enough in this respect.
- Furthermore, C++ is too low-level to make it reasonable to implement a copying
- GC, thanks to all the nasty casts the programmer might feel like doing.
-
- Basically, C++ is a mix between low and "high"-level language and I'm not
- sure it's a good idea, since its high-level features are not really useable
- when you want to use the low-level features and the low-level features make it
- hard to take advantage of several aspects of the high-level features.
-
-
- Stefan
-