Expressive programming language? Was: [Gllug] Speaker Suggestion

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 06:04:51PM +0000, Doug Winter wrote:
> On Thu 08 Jan Richard Jones wrote:
> > Python - I'm sure I'd love this language if I could only get over the
> > syntax.  As with Perl, it's a shame it doesn't have proper garbage
> > collection.
> 
> Yay, flame#1! :)
> 
> What do you mean by 'proper' garbage collection?

As in not just reference counting.  If you're reference counting,
you're suffering a time and space overhead on many common operations.
Java (for all its sins), ML, Lisp, Haskell, etc. include garbage
collectors which don't suffer such problems, and are consequently more
efficient - more efficient even than allocating everything by hand.

Having said that, there's an influential paper on why you might want
both early and late finalization together:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-335.html

Rich.

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