Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: C's sins of commission (was: (pssst...fortran?))
Message-ID: <65451@lanl.gov>
Date: 11 Oct 90 06:35:46 GMT
References: <9010102226.AA16028@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 16

From article <9010102226.AA16028@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu>, by dmiller@YODA.EECS.WSU.EDU:
> Just a minor clarification, you should probably be saying "no programmer-
> visible pointers" rather than "no pointers."  An unqualified "no pointers"
> can be read to imply that a particular implementation would not use pointers.

I have been saying that all along.  The word "pointer" or the phrase
"explicit pointer" means "a variable whose _value_ is an address".
It is my contention that no high-level language should have or
should need such a data type.

What the implementation does internally is the compiler writer's decision.
I assume that the people who champion GOTO free languages don't object
to the compiler generating jump instructions internally to support IFs
and SELECT/CASE, etc..

J. Giles