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From: kevin@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Kevin S. Van Horn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What is B&D? (Re: Bondage and Discipline Languages)
Message-ID: <9175@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 20 Jan 89 18:20:09 GMT
References: <8784@megaron.arizona.edu>
Reply-To: kevin@cit-vax.UUCP (Kevin S. Van Horn)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 22

In article <8784@megaron.arizona.edu> gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
writes:
 [with reference to treating a variable as an integer at one point and as
  a pointer at another point]
>The question is _how_ you do it.  You have to use variant records in
>Pascal and Modula-2 and unchecked_conversion in Ada.  This is because
>the designers of Pascal, Modula-2, and Ada thought that sort of thing
>was dangerous, and wanted to make it inconvenient to do.  The
>inconvenience was supposed to discourage such practices, and the extra
>syntax was supposed to make sure it didn't happen by accident.

Give me a break!  What's so horribly difficult and inconvenient about writing
x.f1 when you want to use x as a variable of type t1, and x.f2 when you want
to use it as a variable of type t2?  And I think you're way off base when you
say that the designers of Pascal et al. introduced variant records to make
such type conversions difficult; they merely wanted to make them *explicit*.
As to your statement that, "the extra syntax was supposed to make sure it
didn't happen by accident," well I should hope so!  By definition, if you used
a pointer as an integer "by accident" then what you wrote was not what you
really intended, and any rational person would want to know this.

Kevin S. Van Horn