Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Answers, Chapter 2: to point or not to point
Message-ID: <5073@lanl.gov>
Date: 6 Nov 90 19:32:29 GMT
References: <1622:Nov606:57:0190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 18

From article <1622:Nov606:57:0190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>, by brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein):
| In article <3652@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
|>       x(1,:) = x(2,:)
|   [ easy to see that there's no aliasing ]
|   [ C version it's much harder, especially with the rows flipped ]
|
| Jim, I sympathize with the point you're trying to make, but this has
| absolutely nothing to do with pointers. If language L has array slicing
| and array assignment, then it will understand the above statement
| directly, and can optimize just as easily as Fortran. Pointers never
| appear.

However, the context of this discussion is whether to use arrays or
to use pointers _instead_.  If pointers exist _in_addition_ I could
care less as I would almost never use them.  Certainly not in a case
like this anyway.

J. Giles