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5.17 Class MEMORY

indexing

description: "Facilities for tuning up the garbage collection mechanism. This class may be used as ancestor by classes needing its facilities."

class interface

feature -- Status report

collecting: BOOLEAN

-- Is garbage collection enabled?

feature -- Status setting

collection_off

-- Disable garbage collection.

collection_on

-- Enable garbage collection.

feature -- Removal

dispose

-- Action to be executed just before garbage collection

-- reclaims an object.

-- Default version does nothing; redefine in descendants

-- to perform specific dispose actions. Those actions

-- should only take care of freeing external resources;

-- they should not perform remote calls on other objects

-- since these may also be dead and reclaimed.

full_collect

-- Force a full collection cycle if garbage

-- collection is enabled; do nothing otherwise.

end