Re: pointer elimination in C

Karen Miller <miller@crx.ece.cmu.edu> writes:
>I am translating C into another language which does not implement pointers.


I would be interested to know what that language is - any serious language
-does- in effect provide pointers, but restricts the operations you can do
on them in the interests of hygene. LISP for example, provides almost
nothing but pointers - typically only short integers and possibly short
floats will not be pointers. Some languages (e.g. Pascal) separate the
notion of call-by-reference from that of pointers proper, with the idea of
limiting the ways in which a pointer can become invalid.


C was, as they would say in Congress, -very unique- in providing pointer
arithmetic. This simply reflected the fact that good compilers had to be
shoehorned into a tiny computer, the DEC-11, and there was a simple
one-to-one mapping between something like *x++ and one machine
instruction.


Robin Popplestone.
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