From b.m.cook@cs.keele.ac.uk Sun Oct 31 15:49:04 2004 From: B.M. Cook To: P.H.Welch Cc: java-threads@ukc.ac.uk, occam-com@ukc.ac.uk Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 10:34:29 +0100 (BST) Subject: Re: "No aliasing = no garbage collection" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL0] Message-ID: Ruth writes: > I believe there should be a garbage collection scheme added to occam. It is > a great language for many things, but it is let down in areas which people > care about intensely. Before that becomes useful, occam needs to have dynamic memory allocation. Perhaps I can take this opportunity to remind everyone of a paper in WoTUG19: "The Globalisation of occam" P Singleton & B M Cook in Parallel Processing Developments, Ed B C O'Neill, 1996, pp 255-270 which discusses the recently mooted, and other, issues. The final paragraph of the "Summary and some proposals" section is: "We therefore propose that occam should be re-invented as a micro-kernel overlaid with one or more customising layers: the kernel (let us call it 'occam Lite') will be more general than traditional occam, supporting recursive procedure calls, dynamic memory allocation, garbage collection, dynamically sized arrays, and a more general system of basic types. This core virtual machine will be a target for the compilation of both 'Classic occam' (i.e. occam 2) and 'New occam' (the innovative flavour which will take the world by storm)." I'm not sure that we are yet in a position to implement this fully; some issues are still emerging (and Tom Locke is doing us all a big favour in exposing some of them). We DO have many answers and need to keep working on the rest. Could there be enough interest for a Language Design SIG? Barry. -- /----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Barry M Cook, BSc, PhD, CEng, MBCS | | Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, | | Chartered Information Systems Engineer. Keele University, | | Keele, | | Phone: +44 1782 583411 Staffordshire, | | FAX: +44 1782 713082 ST5 5BG, | | email: barry@cs.keele.ac.uk UK. | \----------------------------------------------------------------------------/