Re: Is garbage collection here yet?

Neil Madden <nem@cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
> Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
>> The simple one: every collection defines iterators, so you
>> can always find all objects that are referenced by the
>> Hashtable, even if you had no other ref to some Key-object.

> ... You don't need to know which objects are referenced by the
> hashtable, but rather which hashtable entries are referenced by
> keys in the application. For instance, if you have string
> keys, then you potentially need to scan every string in your
> application to see if it matches a hashtable entry -- sound familiar?

No, we obviously do not agree on the definition of "garbage"
to start from.

My definition: garbage is, what the programm cannot access anymore.
Your (appearant) definition: anything the program doesn't need anymore.

I'm bold enough to claim that your definition is flakey, because
it is not determinable without a deeper knowledge of the program.

References are "not Tcl" in about the same way as dynamic code
or accessing caller's local variables is "not Java".
Received on Sun Apr 30 02:34:59 2006