Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Arrays and pointers
Message-ID: <4091@lanl.gov>
Date: 23 Sep 88 20:54:41 GMT
References: <463@quintus.UUCP>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 22

From article <463@quintus.UUCP>, by ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe):
> [...]
> A pointer is the way of referring to a dynamically allocated object, ...
>                                                                    ^
> COMMA!!  A pointer is for lots of other things too.
> But "placing a structural template" sounds more like EQUIVALENCE (:-)...

But there are _better_ ways of doing all those other things - ie. with
a separate feature for each thing instead of overloading all those
completely different features onto the same construct.  I can do all
numerical work with just integers, but I don't - I _want_ the language
to also support floating point, bit, complex, etc..  In the same way,
I _want_ the dynamic memory feature to be different from the linked-list
(recursive data type) feature to be different from....  A pointer isn't
even the _best_ way of referring to a dynamically allocated object
(I'd rather just refer to it as a 'whatevertype' variable, not as a
'pointer_to_whatevertype').  The bottom line is that a user visable
pointer is just another source of possible error - something I can do
without.

J. Giles
Los Alamos