Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!ig!arizona!mike
From: mike@cs.arizona.edu (Mike Coffin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Anyone want to design a language?
Message-ID: <18172@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 22 Feb 90 15:47:43 GMT
References: <14244@lambda.UUCP>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 18

From article <14244@lambda.UUCP>, by jlg@lambda.UUCP (Jim Giles):
> C doesn't _have_ arrays!  It has a strange variant of pointers which
> can (on rare occasions) simulate arrays in a way that is almost as
> efficient and easy to read as arrays would have been.

A correction for those readers not familiar with C: the above is not
true.  Arrays and pointers are different beasts.  The confusion arises
because array names are *converted* to pointers when passed as
parameters and because the [] operator can be used on both.  To make
an analogy, in both Fortran and C, integers are sometimes converted
automatically to reals (floats in C) and many of the same operators apply
to integers and reals but that doesn't mean that Fortran and C don't
really _have_ an integer data type.

-- 
Mike Coffin				mike@arizona.edu
Univ. of Ariz. Dept. of Comp. Sci.	{allegra,cmcl2}!arizona!mike
Tucson, AZ  85721			(602)621-2858