The lost art (Was: The VAX is running

[Rich Alderson]

> From: Pete Turnbull
> Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 11:02 AM

> Garbage collection isn't as trivial as one might think.  There's a 
> trade-off between space and time, and there's a well-known story about 
> a student of David Moon's at MIT(?), and Marvin Minsky (who wrote a 
> pretty well-known GC at SAIL).  Search Google for "Minsky garbage" and 
> look up http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/dae/notes/ai-koans

Marvin Minsky was never at SAIL (in the academic sense--he probably did
visit at one time or another).  His career was all at MIT; he is a
contemporary of Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist.

Also, I think you are confusing the koan about Moon and the student who
discovers reference-counting garbage collection, and the koan about
Minsky's response to Sussman's random wiring of a neural net.  Note that
Sussman and Moon are contemporaries, along with Steele of Common Lisp fame.

Garbage collection is in point of fact so nontrivial that many papers on
the topic were published in CACM, JACM, and other ACM and IEEE pubs in
the 60s, 70s and into the 80s.  I read most of them when I was into LISP implementation.


Rich Alderson
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Vulcan, Inc.
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