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Garbage Collection
Technique
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An automatic memory management technique that reclaims memory occupied by objects a running program no longer uses. Invented by John McCarthy, already a pioneer entity on this atlas, around 1959 as part of the Lisp programming language runtime, and described in his 1960 paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, published in Communications of the ACM.
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Origin YearThe technique is dated to around 1959, but its own seminal description did not appear in print until McCarthy's 1960 Communications of the ACM paper; the invention year and the publication year are two different dates, both recorded rather than collapsed into one. Core PrincipleMemory a program can no longer reach is identified automatically and reclaimed, so the programmer never issues an explicit free instruction for it. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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