[fpc-devel] Re: [fpc-l] type discussion

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Sun, 5 Jun 2005, schreef Jamie McCracken:

> Its not a black or white issue IMO its a shade of grey. At the end of
> the day you have to make a judgement call based on the facts. Im
> asserting that with non-component objects the incidence of cycles is so
> rare that provided we have a means of adding weak refs so that
> knowledgable developers can overcome them when they do occur then the
> issue of cycles can be ignored - after all if the probability of leaks
> is based on a one in a million occurance of a cycle (Im not saying thats
> an accurate probability!) coupled with an ignorant or naive developer
> then thats an acceptable risk to me. If it turns out that cyclic
> occurances are far more common than that then yeah that could be a
> killer. There are of course workarounds but I dont like any of them - EG
> python 2.3 does ref counting but also uses a mark sweep GC to mop up
> cicrular refs but I really dont think we need to consider that.

Hmmmm... I don't think a programming language where one cannot safely
build graphs or ringbuffers will be very powerfull. Writing a compiler in
it would be impossible to give an example.

Daniël