Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!firth
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: NOT Educating FORTRAN programmers to use C
Message-ID: <5741@bd.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 90 12:59:15 GMT
References: <17036@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> <14203@lambda.UUCP>
Reply-To: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 18

In article <14203@lambda.UUCP> jlg@lambda.UUCP (Jim Giles) writes:

>You just made it.  In C there is _NO_DIFFERENCE_ between a pointer and
>an array.  In these other languages, there _IS_ a difference!  In a 
>procedure in C, any two non-local pointers must be assumed _aliased_
>to each other (and to all other non-local objects) because they _might_
>be.  That is part of the legitimate functionality of pointers: dynamic
>aliasing.

Type-safe dynamic aliasing, as provided in Pascal, Modula-2, Ada &c
is indeed a most useful and legitimate part of the functionality of
pointers.

It is also a virtually useless and illegitimate part of the functionality
of arrays.

For this reason, a language that conflates pointers and arrays is
seriously misdesigned.  On this one, I vote for Fortran.