[Haskell-cafe] Very silly

[Dan Weston]

Not that I want or need to defend C++ on this list, but 
reference-counted smart pointers (e.g. boost::shared_ptr<>), embedded 
inside copy-on-write proxy classes, largely simulates eager garbage 
collection. Targeted overriding of the new operator can make this lazier 
for efficiency.

In other words, there are well established idioms in most successful 
languages to solve obvious problems. Haskell's strengths are more in 
making these idioms simple and robust enough for the average user, not 
just the guru, and to make difficult or impossible the misuse of unsafe 
idioms.

Dan

Don Stewart wrote:
> asandroq:
>> 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
> 
> This is why memory management is a notoriously trivial problem in C++ ;)
> 
> -- Don (who thinks that complicated access patterns aren't unique to FP)
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