Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Re: Aggressive optimization vs HLL's
Message-ID: <13436:Nov1604:33:0390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 90 04:33:03 GMT
References: <7226:Nov1521:52:4690@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <6074@lanl.gov>
Organization: IR
Lines: 35

In article <6074@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
> Take the case where you strongly attacked arrays (as opposed
> to pointers) and in the _same_ article stated that high-level
> structures should be preprocessed to pointers.  This prompted me to
> make the assumption (correct according to context) that arrays were
> among the things you wished to preprocess out.

Okay, I know which you're referring to. Apparently my failure to
disclaim a position suffices for people to assume that I hold such a
position. My apologies for failing to communicate well enough.

Once and for all, I think it's stupid to eliminate arrays from a
language (unless, of course, there's no higher-level replacement to do
the job). When I ``attacked arrays,'' I was only attacking Jim's
position that arrays (as in current languages) could be made as
efficient as pointers (as in C or machine language) by a sufficiently
smart compiler.

  [ question about Ada shifting an array[0..10] to array[-5..5] ]
> Again, the Fortran Extended mechanism can do this.

In that case I'm willing to believe that arrays can be made as efficient
as pointers in the new Fortran---though not in any widely used language.

> That's because there is only _one_ person on the net who refuses to
> look at anything but _extant_ languages.

Be serious. I'm perfectly willing to look at language features outside
of current languages. What I'm not willing to do is abuse current
terminology. See, when you say something like ``arrays are _always_ as
efficient as pointers,'' I assume that you're talking about arrays as in
real languages and pointers as in real languages. If we don't have a
common terminology, how can we talk rationally?

---Dan