Re: how many objects r eligible for garbage Collection ?

From:

Lew <lew@lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:25:25 -0500

Message-ID:

<F5-dnf30y5f4FjnanZ2dnUVZ_oDinZ2d@comcast.com>

Tim Smith wrote:

In article <t7udnd-ZafcBuD7anZ2dnUVZ_vWtnZ2d@comcast.com>,
Lew <lew@lewscanon.com> wrote:

class Card {

Why not public?

Does it matter?

Yes.

Short story=5;

Please follow the indentation conventions in order to make your code more
readable.

Why is 'story' not private?

Does it matter?

Yes.

....

Does c3 occupies memory and is eligible for garbage collection..

What is the value of c3?

Hint: null is not an object.

When we say

Card c3 = null;

Isnt memory allocated to this reference for storing valid object.. and
is now available for gc .. ???

Reference to what? c3 is null, so it doesn't point to any object, valid or
not.

But it takes memory to hold that null. The original poster is a bit
unclear on how memory works in Java (else he wouldn't be asking these
questions), so quite possibly he wants to know if that memory is
eligible for garbage collection.

There is no such thing as GCing a null, so no, memory to hold a null reference
is not eligible for GC.

--
Lew