[Haskell-cafe] Very silly

Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva asandroq at gmail.com
Thu Oct 16 13:13:55 EDT 2008


Hallo,

Andrew Coppin wrote:
> 
> C++ has some interesting ideas. I haven't learned how to use templates
> yet, but what I do find interesting is that there is no automatic memory
> management, and yet you can still do fairly dynamic programming. I've
> never seen any other language that allows this. (I had assumed it's
> impossible...) This makes me wonder just now necessary GC really is, and
> whether there is some way to avoid it...
> 

     Garbage collection was invented by Lisp implementors because of a
common pattern in functional languages: The sharing of parts of
structures, like lists. In an imperative world this is straightforward,
one allocates a linked list, uses it, and then releases the memory. In a
world full of closures that may have captured parts of your list, manual
memory management is near impossible.

-alex
http://www.ventonegro.org/


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