Abstract
We study shedding in the setting of data linkage dynamics, a simple model of computation that bears on the use of dynamic data structures in programming. Shedding is complementary to garbage collection. With shedding, each time a link to a data object is updated by a program, it is determined whether or not the link will possibly be used once again by the program, and if not the link is automatically removed. Thus, everything is made garbage as soon as it can be viewed as garbage. By that, the effectiveness of garbage collection becomes maximal.