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Originally posted by Dadi:
Can anybody confirm whether the following stament is true on GC. I think it is true.

- The programmer can signify through a reference that an object is no longer needed - True/False

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If you just see the vanilla meaning of this statement it is true. A programmer can give a green signal to the GC to reclaim the memory by setting the object's reference to null. If you purposly keep one more reference to the object and then set one ref to null means, you are cheating yourself. You are responsible for that. Sometimes without the programmer's knowledge there may be another ref kept to the object. For example, when you pass a ref to a method (which is written by someone else and you don't have the source code) you CAN NOT be sure, after that method invocation, whether there is one more ref added to this input ref during the method execution. The wish of setting an object's reference to null is as though saying that 'as far as I am concerned I do not need this object anymore' and you are signifying the GC to collect the memory of that object. Checking if there is one more ref to this object and claiming the memory back (if at all GC tries to collect this object) is upto to the GC mechanism.
regds
maha anna