Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Pointer examples and 8x
Message-ID: <13988@lanl.gov>
Date: 13 Jul 89 22:12:49 GMT
References: <3111@garth.UUCP>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 13

From article <3111@garth.UUCP>, by smryan@garth.UUCP (s m ryan):
>>Bletch!  Well, so much for allowing implementations which occasionally
>>compact the heap.  If you're counting on the same address (or pointer
> 
> Feh! If the cell is moved, all references to that cell must be remapped.
> Compaction must be invisible or the collector is broken.

Wait a minute!  How does the memory manager know that you've copied the
value of a pointer into a temporary variable (for circular list detect)?
Unless you want all pointer assignments to be implemented as subroutine
calls to the memory manager, the manager only knows those references
that the block was allocated to.  (It's issues like this that cause me
to oppose introducing pointers in the first place.)