Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> On 3/16/2012 12:38, Warp wrote:
> >    I think you are talking about system resources. A program may use other
> > resources than simply system resources.

> Like what?

  "When the last reference to this sprite dies, remove it from the screen."

  "When the last reference to this timer dies, remove it from the runloop."

  And so on. (Actual real-life examples.)

> > The quintessential example would be if you wanted to implement a
> > copy-on-write mechanism.

> That hasn't anything to do with finalizers. In advanced systems, that sort 
> of stuff isn't something you write in the application code, either, any more 
> than worrying about taking things out of the B-tree is something a SQL 
> programmer worries about when deleting a row.

  Sure. If that's the principle, then every program you could ever want
to write is rather simple: Just something like "do_what_i_want();"

  A system cannot offer *everything* that a programmer might ever want.
At some level a feature has to be implemented. If you want CoW, that has
to be implemented somewhere. It cannot just magically work out of nowhere.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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