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From: sharam@munnari.oz.au (Sharam Hekmatpour)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: references to dereferenced null pointers
Message-ID: <3374@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 19 Mar 90 03:51:51 GMT
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From article <33209@brunix.UUCP>, by sdm@cs.brown.edu (Scott Meyers):

> [...]
> Of course, I also
> tend to believe that references are an idea whose time should never have
> come.  Maybe someone can enlighten me: what do references offer besides
> syntactic sugar?

Nothing. But the syntactic sugar offered by references is so important in
that you can't eliminate them without losing much of the convenience
of C++. I can name two things:

[1] Efficient implementation of overloaded operators that involve large
    objects (eg, matrices) requires the operands to be references.
    Pointers simply won't work.

[2] A call to a function that returns a reference is an lvalue. This
    syntactic sugar is very useful.

> From my limited vantage point, they're just like
> pointers, but you can't new/delete them, you can't reassign them, and you
> can't compare them against 0.

There are things that you can do using references but not pointers.
See my previous posting for an example involving a 'delete' that zeros
pointers.

> Don't get me wrong: I like sugar as much as
> anybody else, but syntactic sweetness has never been C++'s strong suit.  In
> the case of references, I find that the confusion outweighs the
> convenience.

I disagree. High level languages are all about syntactic sugaring;
eliminate them and what you end up with is an assembler-like language.

> Scott
> sdm@cs.brown.edu

Sharam Hekmatpour
sharam@munnari.oz.au