Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!pur-phy!cca From: cca@pur-phy (Charles C. Allen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Data types, pointers, etc. Message-ID: <1475@pur-phy> Date: 27 Sep 88 01:24:20 GMT Organization: Purdue Univ. Phys Dept, W.Lafayette, IN Lines: 19 In this discussion of pointers and data structures, I hope that people will occasionally pause to take a somewhat broader view of things (beyond what they think should go in FORTRAN 8x). Yes, FORTRAN has very little in the way of data structuring facilities, and yes, pointers are one way to build those, and yes, pointers as implemented in C can be dangerous. Languages do exist that have the sort of structures people have been talking about, without resorting to pointers and all their difficulties. Smalltalk, for example, has classes called OrderedCollection (stacks and queues), SortedCollection, Set, Bag, Dictionary (essentially keyed hash tables), and MappedCollection (mappings of one collection to another). I'm not suggesting Smalltalk as a substitute for FORTRAN (at least, not yet :-), just that other people have looked at this sort of thing before and come up with solutions that bear looking at. Charlie Allen cca@newton.physics.purdue.edu