Re: OT: Language War (Re: "C" Manual)

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Thursday, January 3, William T Wilson did write:

> On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> 
> > I'll agree that the two are related; in fact, I'd go so far as to say
> > that if a language supports dynamic memory allocation and type-safety,
> > it *has* to have some sort of automatic storage management system.
> 
> I don't think that necessarily follows; a manual mechanism for freeing
> resources would then just set the reference to a NULL value.

Not in the general case, no.

    std::string *s = new string("foo");
    std::string *s2 = s;

    delete s;

If we assume a variant of C++ that extends delete to set its argument
pointer to NULL, you still have the problem of s2 hanging around.  In
the general case, it's not so obvious that you've got two pointers to
reset.