Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!decwrl!megatest!djones From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones) Newsgroups: comp.sw.components Subject: Re: Re: Garbage Collection & ADTs Message-ID: <8309@goofy.megatest.UUCP> Date: 27 Sep 89 00:25:10 GMT References: <599@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca Lines: 41 From article <599@hsi86.hsi.UUCP>, by wright@hsi.UUCP (Gary Wright): .. > > Well, I have *never* encountered a situation that absolutely demanded using > a high level language. That is why I still do all my programming in > assembly. :-) > Sorry, but I'm too tired of this assembler-hll analogy for a smiley to save you. Grumble. Ggrrrrrrrrrrrrmpf. Okay, okay, here: :-) (Sort of.) The analogy is particularly inappropriate in this context, because Assembler and HLL are two techniques for preparing a program, whereas automatically garbage-collected and explicitly garbage-collected programs are different end-results.* Automated garbage collection is runtime overhead. It will take quite a bit of convincing to make me believe that it is universally necessary or desirable. I'm not saying it's impossible, only that it's going to take better arguments than I've seen so far. So in the mean time, I want the option of not using it. So far I have used it approximately, now let's see.. approximately zero times, give or take once. * The principle advantage of high-level languages over assembler is usually that it makes the program portable. It is a myth that assembly language programming is necessarily tedious and slow. Back in the mid to late seventies, there were macro-assembler and macro packages that made assembly language programming virtually as easy as programming in high level languages. I wrote one once. It handled procedure call/return, nested loops, structures, and all that sort of languagy kind of stuff quite nicely. Those macro packages were the evolutionary antecedants of HLLs. Languages like C++ do automate some rather tedious name-space manipulation, and that is another win. But many of the even "higher" level languages kind of miss the boat by making the syntax of the language reflect library-routine functionality. I like new AWK, for example, but I really wish it were written as C++ classes, so that I could integrate it with my own stuff.