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From: gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.lang.c
Subject: Re: same syntax for using pointers and arrays
Message-ID: <119@l5.uucp>
Date: Sat, 14-Sep-85 05:34:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5.119
Posted: Sat Sep 14 05:34:35 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Sep-85 05:15:04 EDT
References: <1024@brl-tgr.ARPA> <1700001@fthood>
Organization: Ell-Five [Consultants], San Francisco
Lines: 13
Xref: linus net.unix-wizards:11970 net.lang.c:5819
Summary: great for fixed size buffer -> malloc conversions

I've converted several C programs from having fixed buffers allocated
at compile time, to malloc-ing their buffers at run time, and the
change was almost always trivial, since you could turn a global array
into a global pointer and change few if any other lines of source.
This would be a pain in most other languages.  I've done this to tar's
tape block size at Sun and just did it to the terminal screen size in
2.10.3 vnews.

*I think it's a great feature* although I wish they hadn't let you
declare a function parameter as an array and then treated it as a
pointer, since there definitely ARE differences.  Maybe that can be a
"commonly available extension" to the ANSI standard, rather than
standardizing it that way?