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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
Subject: Re: Reference Counting (was Searching Method for Incremental Garbage Collection)
Message-ID: <hbakerCzqzuE.G3E@netcom.com>
Organization: nil
References: <hbakerCzpJy7.ItH@netcom.com> <Czqu5L.6Cy@world.std.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 1994 01:23:02 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c:117696 comp.lang.c++:100173 comp.lang.lisp:15789

In article <Czqu5L.6Cy@world.std.com> tob@world.std.com writes:
>hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker) writes:
>> Good ideas.  Now can you formalize these rules & prove conditions
>> under which any & all garbage will be collected?  I'm trying to
>> understand _provably safe styles_ of programming.
>
>Wow, we must really be approaching it from different perspectives.
>
>You seem to want a more formal(?) academic(?) statement, which I'm at a
>loss to frame. I probably have some implicit assumption, or assumptions,
>that you don't. To me, as a programmer, hearing or saying "there's a top
>structure that owns everything inside." expresses the idea precisely
>enough. I'm not sure what it is you want me to make more precise.

I'm not trying to be dense.  What does 'own' mean?  What does 'inside'
mean?  How is ownership transferred and/or controlled?  What happens
in the presence of exceptions?  These are the kinds of things that
need to be made precise in order to convert good ideas into a robust,
workable _style_ of programming.

Henry Baker
Read (192.100.81.1) ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hbaker/README for ftp-able papers.
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