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From: ech@cbnewsk.att.com (ned.horvath)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: THINK C Suggestions
Message-ID: <1990Oct9.174549.5315@cbnewsk.att.com>
Date: 9 Oct 90 17:45:49 GMT
References: <1990Oct9.020415.16763@eng.umd.edu>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 20

From article <1990Oct9.020415.16763@eng.umd.edu>, by russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto):

> ...If you make a smart
> compiler, you can recognize handles to structs and add the extra de-reference
> automagically-- I'd like to see that (in both THINK and MPW.)


I would NOT.  A handle to a purgable object -- resources are the typical
case -- has to be checked before use:
	if (*thud)
		LoadResource (thud);
	HNoPurge (thud);
	/* use it */
	HPurge (thud);
and blurring the distinction between handles and pointers is hardly helpful.

It could be argued that (*thud).member should be different from thud->member,
but those two have been equivalent since the original K&R book.

=Ned Horvath=