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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
Subject: Re: Reference Counting (was Re: Searching Method for Incremental Garbage Collection)
Message-ID: <hbakerD04xIK.FGL@netcom.com>
Organization: nil
References: <3bg6ci$18k@gamma.ois.com> <3bii2g$kn2@news.parc.xerox.com> <3bjfep$9ss@gamma.ois.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 13:59:08 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c:118693 comp.lang.c++:101200 comp.lang.lisp:15887 comp.lang.ada:24248

In article <3bjfep$9ss@gamma.ois.com> beckwb@ois.com (R. William Beckwith) writes:
>Good point.  If you know you have other strong references to an
>object, you can use weak pointers for interators and such.  That
>helps a little.  I would recommend using weak pointers for any object
>that doesn't have a strong pointer to it declared in the immediate
>or enclosing scope.

(In case anyone else is following this thread)

Please note that your use of the term 'weak pointer' is nonstandard.
'Weak pointers' are used in tracing/coping GC's to refer to pointers
which aren't traced, but _are_ updated, possibly to NIL, by the
garbage collector.

A non-increment/decrement pointer in a reference counted system I
have called a 'deferred increment' pointers.  I have a recent paper
in Sigplan Notices (and my ftp/www archive) which investigates
this issue more thoroughly.

Henry Baker
Read (192.100.81.1) ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hb/hbaker/README for ftp-able papers.
WWW archive: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html
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