Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language

mwotton@cse.unsw.edu.au (Mark Alexander Wotton) wrote:
>
>Sorry, I was being imprecise. From ten thousand feet up, the idea of garbage
>collection is to deallocate memory that is no longer referenced, ie
>out of scope. Whether you do it immediately (reference counting) or later is
>an implementation issue.


Note that there is at least one automatic memory management system
(compile-time region analysis) that can free memory which is still
referenced but which will never be used. A simple example of this is
that you only need the spine of a list to calculate its length, so if
that is all you are going to do to the list then its elements can be
freed early even though they are still referenced.


Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/

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