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| Pointers to global and stack variables shreyas76@gmail.com (shrey) (2005-11-26) |
| Re: Pointers to global and stack variables henry@spsystems.net (2005-11-27) |
| Re: Pointers to global and stack variables 148f3wg02@sneakemail.com (Karsten Nyblad) (2005-11-29) |
| Re: Pointers to global and stack variables alexc@TheWorld.com (Alex Colvin) (2005-11-30) |
| From: | Alex Colvin <alexc@TheWorld.com> |
| Newsgroups: | comp.compilers |
| Date: | 30 Nov 2005 17:29:11 -0500 |
| Organization: | The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 |
| References: | 05-11-118 05-11-126 |
| Keywords: | design, storage |
| Posted-Date: | 30 Nov 2005 17:29:11 EST |
>> I am trying to understand what might be a few major and general
>>reasons why programmers might have pointers to global and stack data as
>>compared to pointers to heap which are essential to building data
>>structures...
There are a couple of uses that I can think of. The most important is
call-by-reference. You want to be able to pass the address of a local
or global variable for modification, or pass a pointer to large object
to avoid copying.
In languages like Pascal, this doesn't look like a pointer (which can
really only point to the heap), but in C it's a pointer just like a
heap pointer.
In Java this is necessarily a heap pointer - you can't call by
reference and you can't point to a non-object.
Another use, as was pointed out, is statically constructed linked
structures.
--
mac the naïf
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