Re: Compiler writers will love this language

Joachim Durchholz <joachim.durchholz@web.de> writes:
|> Eric wrote:
|> > mwotton@cse.unsw.edu.au (Mark Alexander Wotton) wrote
|> >
|> >>Either that, or only released when all references to it have passed
|> >>out of scope. This is how many modern garbage-collected language
|> >>implementations work.
|> >
|> > This scheme (reference-counting) is used in VB6 for instance.
|>
|> No, garbage-collected languages don't use reference counting.


Eh? Few if any "garbage-collected languages" specify the method they
use, or even whether the garbage is ever collected. It is one of the
great faults of their design, because it makes it much, much harder to
write reliable portable code.


|> > VB7 (and
|> > every other .NET language?)
|>
|> AFAIK, .net uses automatic garbage collection.


Reference counting IS a form of automatic garbage collection. Not a
very powerful one, as you point out, but it is still one.




Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

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