Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!mcvax!guido From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: What makes a language "easy" to program in? Message-ID: <350@piring.cwi.nl> Date: 8 Jun 88 08:45:52 GMT References: <711@cunixc.columbia.edu> <3799@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <712@cunixc.columbia.edu> Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) Distribution: comp Organization: The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Amoebae Lines: 15 In article [...] evan@cunixc.columbia.edu (Evan Bigall) writes: >But, you have to remember that the lack of pointers is a feature not >a bug. It removes the problem of aliasing allowing for a much better >data flow/dependency analysis. I would much rather see records added to APL >than pointers. Typically things like trees are implemented by indexing into >tables. It makes for very clumsy and slow code, but hey this is APL! It >wasnt meant to do things like that. Remember that trees are often used as a way to implement other abstractions: associative arrays, sorted sets with easy insert/ retrieve/delete operations, etc. It might be more appropriate to add such "higher-level" data types to a language than pointers. -- Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net