Inappropriate deallocation of dynamic storage is a well-known source of catastrophic program failures. In the context of nonextensible applications, such as statically linked programs, this problem can (in theory) be mastered by a careful programmer; for extensible programs, it cannot! There is always the possibility that a module may be added to a program later on; such an extension can introduce additional references to objects of which the implementor of the core modules is unaware. Therefore, Oberon neither requires nor allows explicit deallocation of dynamic storage.
#oberon #gc #programming #programming_languages