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- Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
- Path: newsfeed.ed.ac.uk!edcogsci!jeff
- From: jeff@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
- Subject: Re: Why garbage collection?
- Message-ID: <DM09G0.MzG.0.macbeth@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
- Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
- References: <hbaker-2201961503250001@10.0.2.15> <4eae5s$66p@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <822675271snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 17:47:59 GMT
-
- In article <822675271snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk writes:
- >In article <4eae5s$66p@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
- > haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de "Bruno Haible" writes:
- >
- >> Just look at the technical strength of the argument that GC is not
- >> "in the tradition of the C community"...
- >
- >Yeah, I love it. ;-)
-
- But it _is_ true that GC is not in the tradition of the C community.
- The argument that it's a "hidden cost" is key here. C programmers
- feel that they know what everything will do in machine terms, and
- to a fair extent they are right. (That's so despite a number of
- difficulties and exceptions.)
-
- So when a allocation might do lots of collecting as well (or
- whatever), and you don't really know when, that seems to move
- C into the higher-level / less-in-touch-with-the-machine camp.
-
- >Mind you, I'm very happy with a mark/compact GC, and I found one
- >in a computer science book, Fundamentals of Data Structures, by
- >E Horowitz and S Sahni. While they're not anti-GC, they refer to
- >Knuth and his belief that specialist languages such as Lisp and
- >SNOBOL are not necessary, and that list and string processing can
- >be done in any language. The languages that seem to have interested
- >them tend to be PL/I, Pascal, and Fortran. Not at all like Lisp.
-
- Well, surely it's true that list and string processing can be done
- in (almost) any language. I've done list processing in Basic, for
- instance. (Good Basics can, of course, do strings, so that's not
- interesting.)
-
- But there's a difference between a language is not necessary
- and saying it's not valuable, or not worth having and using.
- I'm not sure when Knuth stated this belief, but such points had
- a different role in the past then they tend to do today,
- because it was not so widely known that, or how, you could
- do list or string processing.
-
- A similar thing today (or maybe a few years back) might be to
- point out that you could do object-oriented programming in
- (almost) any language.
-
- -- jd
-