I don't disagree with any of that, Marcus. I do feel compelled to point out that garbage collectors are extremely heavy weight language components, and are one of the features of Java that prevent it from competing with C++ for large-scale computational efficiency.
--Doug On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Marcus G. Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com>wrote: > Douglas Roberts wrote: > >> To some, I suppose lack of efficiency and the ability to implement pure, >> faithful representations of the physical system being modeled are positive >> attributes of a language. >> Therefore, 100% faithfulness of representation of the physical system is >> not only not needed, it can get in the way of producing results. >> >> There's faithful in the sense of simulating things that aren't relevant > to a model, and then there's faithful in the sense of thinking things > through. Doing the latter needn't get in the way of efficiency, it can > actually facilitate it. In the assisted suicide example, a garbage > collector is in the best position to determine who has references to an > object that is being removed. Without that support, ad-hoc mechanisms to > overwrite dead objects with death signatures would be needed (while keeping > enough of its memory around for the signature pattern), otherwise there'd be > invalid pointers in the simulation after the object was deallocated. > > IMO, research often does get in the way of production work, and vice > versa. > > Marcus > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
