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