Re: Larry Wall, on Tcl

Oscar Fuentes <ofv@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A GC system just manages
memory. This relieves the programmer of one nasty task, namely,
releasing data objects that are no longer needed.

If that's what GC means, then Tcl already has it. Every "data object"
in Tcl is a string. As soon as a variable goes out of scope, or if a
variable's value is modified to require a different amount of memory,
the Tcl interpreter releases the memory originally used. The garbage
collection is immediate, perfect, and unassailable.

But if that's all GC means, it seems rather a trivial thing to get all
worked up over. The label "garbage collection" to me implies something
a lot more involved than simply reclaiming the memory used by unneeded
data. I thought the whole point of GC was to determine *when* data
objects are no longer needed, so that they can be released without
explicit action by the programmer.

Another major advantage of GC is that it makes natural certain
programming practices, such as Functional Programming, with its
closures, functors, etc. and attaching data context to code in
general. This is a very important "feature" of GC.

I'll admit to being mostly ignorant on the fine points of FP. My
partially informed impression is that data is temporary, and doesn't
stick around when it's not needed. I'd imagine GC in such a case is
also immediate, and thus barely qualifies as GC the way I thought of it.
.

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