On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Gary McGovern wrote:
> Thanks for that info. But I vaguely remember deliberately making zombies with Learning Works. But 
> I'm sure it is more relevant to a system than an application. 

>I find it hard to take that the course team 
> would have just stuffed a Unix term into Smalltalk unless it had already been adopted by the 
> Smalltalk world such as on a system like the Alto.

No comment! (But I'd believe anything of folk who seek to re-create the myth
that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack and describe the
workings of an Internet search engine as a protocol ;-)

Anyway, there are plenty of graybeards here who can remember those days!

> And after all Squeak is working like an OS on top of an OS.

But do all OSs have zombies? 

Seems to me that 3 or 4 different things have been conflated here.

Zombies
Memory Leaks 
objects with no reference

I recon that zombie and memory leak are both being used as metaphors: zombies,
according to Sun, don't use up any system resources; an object which has not
been GCed occupies some memory, but doesn't actually leak any (contrast this
with the way Windows 95 will crash after 40 days or so even if it is doing --
or so it seems --  absolutely nothing).

Cheers

John

-- 
They're afraid, very afraid......
According to CRN magazine, Microsoft staff discovering Linux in use
will have now access to a special 'escalation' team.
Now, where did I put that stake and mallet?
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/16/0310222&mode=nocomment