Warning! Two Newbie questions!

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Apr 17 10:09:36 UTC 2000


Hi bert 

This metaphor is really good.
Thanks 

Having good metaphor is saving so much energy.

A metaphor that I like is to see Envy applications as skin onion
papers on which we can write. We can stakc them and still see the other
applications. 

I like also class as machine producing products in factory.  Products
are instances and inheritance is just that you take one machien and
customise it.

If somebody have other way to present complex concepts I would like to
know them.



> You can imagine objects being balloons. A reference from one object to
> another is a thread holding the balloon. Now, if you cut the thread of one
> balloon, it flies away. The garbage collector is a little aerobatics plane
> that bursts all balloons floating in the air (those without some
> connection to the ground). Thus, it can take some time from releasing the
> reference to garbage collecting the object. Most of the time the little
> plane flies near the ground and kills the balloons that just escaped
> (incremental garbage collection in a background process). It may miss
> some, though. So, in a "full" garbage collect the creation of new balloons
> is frozen and all floating balloons get busted (this happens when you call
> Smalltalk garbageCollect).
> 
>   -Bert-


Stephane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
"if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do 
different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today 
might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes

University of Bern, Institut fuer informatik and Mathematik
IAM-SCG, 10 neubruckstrasse, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland.






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