Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C's sins of commission
Message-ID: <65664@lanl.gov>
Date: 13 Oct 90 00:35:23 GMT
References: <387@shum.huji.ac.il>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 15

From article <387@shum.huji.ac.il>, by gadi@SHUM.HUJI.AC.IL (Gad Aharoni):
> [...]
> To all you pointer haters, I hate to point out that it is exremely
> awkward to implement a graph data structure without the use of pointers.
> [...]

Yes, and an IF statement is exremely awkward to implement without GOTOs.
The fact that the implementation may _internally_ use pointers and/or
GOTOs should trouble no one at the source code level - in fact, for
the most part, they shouldn't need to know or care.  Graphs are easy
to implement as recursive data structures without any user-visible
variable whose value is an address - that is to say: without explicit
pointers.

J. Giles