🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <92Nov10.125426est.47525@neat.cs.toronto.edu> tlai@cs.toronto.edu (Tony Wen Hsun Lai) writes:
>In article <1992Nov10.024021.8724@linus.mitre.org> crawford@boole.mitre.org (Randy Crawford) writes:
>[stuff deleted]
>>Remember too, that when C was born in 1969, most programmers were still 
>>fighting with 300 baud modems, paper tape, and columnar punch cards.  A terse 
>>powerful programming language like C, with user-defined types, dynamic memory 
>>and free-form syntax was a huge step forward.  In a lot of ways, more modern 
>>languages are still trying to catch up.  It was 1992 before Ada 9X offered us 
>>pointers to functions.  But two decades ago they were available in C.

>ALGOL 68 and SIMULA 67 have user-defined types, dynamic memory, and
>free-form syntax, no?  And why do you need explicit pointers to functions
>when you can have procedure types, like Modula-2?

You need explicit pointers to functions when the caller does not know
the name of the function being called, but the caller has received a
pointer to the function.  The same holds for pointers to arrays of
pointers, and to array descriptors.  If several parts of a program
are using the same double buffer, and are even compiled separately,
using a pointer to the active buffer, and another one to the refill
buffer, would be an excellent way to do things.

-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@snap.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
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