[gclist] More questions for the FAQ

[Paul R. Wilson]

>From majordom@iecc.com Wed Mar 20 12:34:34 1996
>Subject: [gclist] More questions for the FAQ
>Date: Wed, 20 Mar 96 13:05:19 EST
>From: David Chase <chase@centerline.com>
>Precedence: bulk
>Reply-To: gclist@iecc.com
>
>I have yet to digest all this discussion about finalization.

Yeah, me too... I've lost it completely.  I hope you do a great job.  :-)

>However, I do have some more proposed questions for the FAQ, but 
>lack complete answers.  Most of these are for the evangelism
>section.
>
>Q: What languages include/require/provide-by-default garbage collection?
>A: Lisp, Smalltalk, ML, most of the scripting languages, Java, 
>   Eiffel, Modula-3, Sather, Python, ... and how far should this 
>   list go?  There's lots of GC'd languages that nobody has ever
>   heard of.  I have some personal favorites, but that doesn't necessarily 
>   count as a good reason to put them in the FAQ.

I'd say it's good to go with popular stuff.  For example, Perl uses
reference counting if I'm not mistaken.  And Mathematica, I'm pretty
sure.

One of Henry's favorite examples is PostScript.  (Level II only, or
Level I, too?  I'm not sure.)  It's nice for people to know they
often use GC whether they're told about it or not.

I believe many popular apps have GC's hidden in them, like various
editors, spreadsheets and word processors, but I don't know which ones. 
The more popular, the better.  (Emacs of course, but that's a sore point
because it does it badly.)  Anybody have good examples?

File systems usually use reference counting, which is good for people
to know, too.  Makes the general idea of GC seem less flaky.