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From: jlg@lambda.UUCP (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Anyone want to design a language?
Message-ID: <14251@lambda.UUCP>
Date: 23 Feb 90 21:43:01 GMT
References: <3528@tukki.jyu.fi>
Lines: 27

From article <3528@tukki.jyu.fi>, by sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen):
> In article <18172@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> mike@cs.arizona.edu (Mike Coffin) writes:
>> [...] Arrays and pointers are different beasts. [...]

This is the only part of Mike Coffin's submission which wasn't totally
misleading.  The question is, if arrays and pointers are different beasts,
why does C mangle them together?  Why doesn't it provide a mechanism
for un-mangling them once the damage has been done?

> A further correction for those readers not familiar with C:
> Giles's posting is a slight exaggeration. [...]

But _only_ a slight exaggeration.  Modularity and library use is _very_
important.  You can't do all your array manipulation with just globals
or restrict your work to the same procedure in which the arrays were
declared.  In fact, for programs of any really useful size, passing
array arguments is vital.  In this respect, at least, C really _DOESN'T_
have arrays.

> [...]
> The confusion between arrays and pointers is perhaps the worst
> single flaw in C.

I almost agree.  But C has an awful lot of flaws.  It's hard to choose
just this one as _the_ worst.

J. Giles