🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <mwm.2lit@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us> mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer) writes:
>In <BxIoDv.72J@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) wrote:
>> In article <92Nov10.125426est.47525@neat.cs.toronto.edu> tlai@cs.toronto.edu (Tony Wen Hsun Lai) writes:
>> >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.

>No, you don't need *explicit* pointers to functions. It's perfectly
>reasonable (and I would argue, preferable) to allow function names
>in argument lists. In C-oid style, this would be:

		..............................

I found this difficult to read, and it does not seem that it handles
the situation I envision.  The way that I would want to use pointers
would be to have fl as the pointer to a fill function, and des as the
pointer to a descriptor array, of which the first two arguments would
be pointers to the current element of the buffer and the bounding position,
and then when it is needed make sure that the current element is correct,
and issue the call

	*fl(*des);

The calling subprogram need not know anything about *fl except that it
fills the buffer, and does not need to know anything about *des except
that the first element of *des is the pointer to the current element of
the buffer, and the second element is the pointer to the bound.

It is quite possible that the calling subprogram might even use several
of these, and again I point out that this subprogram need not know 
anything more that the names of the pointers.

I will consider any suggestions to do this in a better manner, but I
am not willing to make it any less flexible, nor to put any more burdens
on the writers of the subprogram, nor of the (usually separately compiled)
fill functions.
-- 
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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