Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcrware!jejones
From: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C's sins of commission
Message-ID: <3254@mcrware.UUCP>
Date: 8 Oct 90 11:44:07 GMT
References: <64618@lanl.gov) <2883@igloo.scum.com) <2171@enea.se>
Reply-To: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Organization: Microware Systems Corp., Des Moines, Iowa
Lines: 18

In article <2171@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>I must be missing some context here, else this doesn't make sense.
>Of course pointers are a necessary thing. Then it's an issue whether
>you make them explicit like in C, Ada or Pascal, or hide them a
>little and call them references like in Eiffel.

I'm missing context, too, and of course I can't know what the original
posters were referring to, but I'd rather like the ability to define
recursive data structures (I think Hoare wrote a paper about this sort
of thing) rather than using pointers.  I tend to agree--pointers are to
data structure what gotos are to control flow.

Speaking of other sins, though, I also hope that future language
designers will bring a "human factors"/"cognitive engineering" person
along for the ride.  IMHO, C would have been VERY different had this
happened when it was created. 

	James Jones