🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3880@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher) writes:
>The way you would add such data types to a language is to build them out
>of the primitives available, which are pointers (in the case of C), or
>arrays (in the case of APL).  Actually adding them as primitives would
>be a very bad idea -- you could never add enough to make everybody happy.

Not true.  ABC, a language I have helped implement, has no pointers but
provides very general associative arrays (you can use *any type* as the
key type for an array, and of course arrays are types) and sorted
multisets ("lists").  These two primitive data types make up for many
uses of pointers.  True, for things like graphs you have to implement
them using arrays, but now you can choose meaningful values  as the
indices instead of assigning numbers 1, 2, 3, ...; e.g., in a directed
graph, you can use the label of the destination node to represent an
edge.
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net