[gclist] Finalization and object orientation.

[James McCartney]

Eliot Miranda <eliot@parcplace.com> wrote:
>So can we agree that in languages which reify execution state and
>don't allow pointer forging that reachability is decidable?

Not as I understand it. x would be reachable by a Smalltalk garbage
collector, but not truly reachable by the program itself.
He could have just as well have written:

Object>>
---
foo
   | x |
   x := Something new.
   self bar.
   x doSomething.
-----
bar
   true whileTrue: [ ..blah.. ].
-----

x is unreachable by the definition given. It doesn't matter that a
tracing gc would know where it is in an activation frame, the program
will never access it.





   --- james mccartney     james@clyde.as.utexas.edu   james@lcsaudio.com
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