Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!rex!uflorida!haven!uvaarpa!murdoch!astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f
From: gl8f@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers
Subject: Re: Shoulds arrays start at zero or one?
Message-ID: <1990Jan16.173034.25686@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 16 Jan 90 17:30:34 GMT
References: <5487@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> <252@usblues.UUCP>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Reply-To: gl8f@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Distribution: na
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 18
Ireallyam: gl8f

In article <252@usblues.UUCP> tom@usblues.UUCP (Tom Markson) writes:

>Pascal does the pointer manipulations for you.  In pascal, if I wish to change
>a "val" parameter to a reference variable all I must do is add var to it's
>declaration.  In C, I must recode every single occurance of that variable in
>the func to a pointer. (from variable to *variable).  In short, C places the
>burden on the programmer.

Of course, the performance implications of "var" are enormous and often
not told to Pascal students. "I'm passing this 50k array into a procedure,
and, oh, well I don't want to modify it, so I'd better not make it var."
Then your stoopid Pascal compiler makes a local copy...

I should think most C programmers don't find *var to be much of a burden
at all.

Greg Lindahl
gl8f@virginia.edu                                  Astrophysicists for Choice.