Overview of garbage collection in symbolic computing

Many readers of this article have heard the term "garbage collection" on occasion without being given much explanation as to what it is. One purpose of this paper, therefore, is to describe what garbage collection is and why it is a subject of concern for computing in general and symbolic computing in particular. The first section briefly describes garbage collection. The next section gives a general description of what has come to be known as the "classical" garbage collection algorithms. A few of the classical algorithms' shortcomings for use in today's systems are described in the next section. This is followed by a section on a few techniques in garbage collection which address the needs of today's and tomorrow's symbolic computing systems.