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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Relationship between C and C++
Message-ID: <19253@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 90 06:59:53 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 29

In article  <33316@brunix.UUCP> drc@cs.brown.edu (David R. Chase) writes:
>In article <5200048@m.cs.uiuc.edu> robison@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>>This is not the first attack on pointer arithmetic that I have seen.
>>Why is pointer arithmetic denigrated so much?  The C-style pointer
>>arithmetic seems to me to implement a fairly simple abstraction,
>>roughly equivalent to ``a tape and a read/write head.''
>
>Well, one good reason is that in many cases where it pays to do
>pointer arithmetic (loop invariant code, reduction in strength,
>redundant expression elimination), the compiler can do (using
>algorithms published more than 5 years ago) about as good a job as you
>can, except that it won't occasionally make mistakes, and it will
>remember to get it right again when the code is modified.

It seems that most C pointer critics (like this one) are making the
assumption that pointers are used only to avoid inefficiency in array
indexing.  Quite the contrary.  I do a lot of C programming, and I
choose beteen the array abstraction and the pointer abstraction by
whichever fits the problem better.

Pointers are just another form of abstraction, one that a lot of
people find quite useful and intuitive.  I have seen several comments
that pointers are a "low-level" mechanism.  This strikes me as a
content-free statement.  Just how is "low-level" being defined?
-- 
					David Gudeman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona        gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85721                 noao!arizona!gudeman