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Re: Managed-Code Bloat

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Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:48:22 -0400, Michael Wojcik wrote:
> 
>> Martin Gregorie wrote:
>>>>
>>> Garbage collection and stack management are largely irrelevant for
>>> COBOL - all data space is declared statically and the ways in which
>>> PERFORM can be used more or less guarantees that its use will not
>>> involve the stack.
>> That hasn't been true, in general, since COBOL-85. While there certainly
>> are still old COBOL applications with fixed-size memory requirements, a
>> great many written over the past quarter-century make use of arbitrary
>> subroutine call (ie, out-of-line perform and call) patterns, and a
>> smaller number use reentrancy and/or threading.
>>
> OK, I'd agree about dynamically loaded subroutines, though those scarcely 
> need a GC since the allocation/deallocation points are well known,

Agreed so far - I was more concerned with the "stack management" part
of your statement than the "garbage collection" part.

> but
> are you saying that the content of WORKING-STORAGE can be dynamic now? 

I don't have a copy of the COBOL-85 standard handy, but since the
mid-80s various COBOL implementations have provided extensions for
dynamic memory allocation, which COBOL supports through USAGE POINTER,
LINKAGE SECTION, and the SET statement. So Micro Focus COBOL has long
had the CBL_ALLOC_MEM library call; IBM mainframe COBOL has had
various environmental facilities like EXEC CICS SET ADDRESS, GETMAIN,
etc; and so on.

COBOL-2002 specifies the ALLOCATE and FREE statements (which I don't
think were in COBOL-85), standardizing this kind of explicit memory
allocation and release.

Those are *not* garbage-collected allocations, but they pointed to the
desirability of garbage collection for modern COBOL; and that's why
the first proprietary OO COBOL dialects were garbage-collected, and
that remains true with modern OO COBOL, including COBOL-2002 (see
ISO/IEC 1989:2002 9.3.14.2) and Micro Focus COBOL for .NET and JVM.

>> And there have been garbage-collected COBOLs at least since the first OO
>> COBOLs appeared in the 1990s.
>>
> OK - but I've never used or seen those flavours.

Yes, they're still relatively rarely used, compared to traditional
COBOL. I was just noting that the state of the art in the COBOL
standard and implementations has moved on since the old
static-allocation-only days.

-- 
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University

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Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-06 18:47 +1200
  Re: Managed-Code Bloat Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-06-06 06:40 -0300
    Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-06 23:04 +1200
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-06-06 17:41 -0300
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 11:13 +1200
          Re: Managed-Code Bloat Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-06-07 07:08 -0300
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Silvio <silvio@moc.com> - 2011-06-07 09:40 +0200
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2011-06-07 06:08 -0700
  Re: Managed-Code Bloat Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-06-06 11:35 -0400
    Re: Managed-Code Bloat Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla@gmail.com> - 2011-06-06 10:47 -0700
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-06-06 18:21 +0000
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com> - 2011-06-08 11:48 -0400
          Re: Managed-Code Bloat Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-06-08 18:06 +0000
            Re: Managed-Code Bloat Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com> - 2011-06-11 14:00 -0400
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 10:18 +1200
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com> - 2011-06-08 11:59 -0400
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com> - 2011-06-08 11:22 -0400
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat rossum <rossum48@coldmail.com> - 2011-06-08 21:45 +0100
    Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 10:17 +1200
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-06-06 16:37 -0700
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 12:06 +1200
          Re: Managed-Code Bloat Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-06-06 17:44 -0700
            Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 13:38 +1200
              Re: Managed-Code Bloat Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-06-06 20:13 -0700
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 15:41 +1200
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-06-06 20:47 -0700
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-07 01:06 -0700
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 23:53 +1200
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-07 16:04 -0700
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com> - 2011-06-08 13:04 -0400
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat Michal Kleczek <kleku75@gmail.com> - 2011-06-08 09:23 +0200
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-08 03:54 -0700
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat bugbear <bugbear@trim_papermule.co.uk_trim> - 2011-06-07 10:10 +0100
                Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-07 00:37 -0700
      Re: Managed-Code Bloat Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-06-07 07:31 -0300
        Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-07 16:18 -0700
          Re: Managed-Code Bloat Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-06-07 20:50 -0300
          Re: Managed-Code Bloat Gene Wirchenko <genew@ocis.net> - 2011-06-08 07:53 -0700
            Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-08 11:23 -0700
    Re: Managed-Code Bloat BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2011-06-06 16:54 -0700
  Re: Managed-Code Bloat Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-06-06 19:24 -0700
    Re: Managed-Code Bloat Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> - 2011-06-07 15:44 +1200

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