🚀 go-pugleaf

peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>Not all languages with pointers allow arithmetic on them. And you never
>need to do arithmetic on a pointer in C... it is merely convenient. This
>has nothing to do with the definition of a pointer.

The definition of "pointer" comes from an extensive body of literature
on computation.  You should use a term with a meaning closer to what
you wish to express rather than redefining a term with an established
meaning.  CS is already full of overdefined terms.

>> By "token" (a syntax concept), I presume you mean "identifier" (a
>> language concept).

>No, I mean a token. An opaque object. The term is used in other contexts
>than compiler design... consider its use in networking. The rest of your
>paragraph is complete gibberish, I'm afraid, because it's based on a
>misconception.

In the context of computer programming languages, "token" has a
meaning in the context of syntax.  I did not know you were speaking of
networks.  What is the meaning of "pointer" in the context of network?

>What you're arguing about here isn't whether one should have pointers
>at all, merely how restricted the operations on pointers should be. And
>that's a horse of a different color.

I am arguing whether "pointers" are available as a source language
concept.  If I have a "house", it is defined in terms of roof, walls,
etc.  I speak of being in a particular room, etc.  A house may be (but
does not have to be) constructed partially from "boards".  I do not
talk about going from room to room in a house by speaking about
boards.  Boards are not a "house-level" concept.  Why do you insist on
redefining board to be a unit of room traversal?

>I use C for pragmatic reasons. It's the only language that's powerful
>enough for most of the stuff I do that's also widely available and has
>a good enough standard library.

I use Scheme for pragmatic reasons.  It gets in my way the least of
any language around and--unlike C--is portable to a wide variety of
machines with the use of a small source file which encapsulates
implementation differences.  [I routinely work on Vax, Sun3/4, Amiga,
PC, Mac, etc. with the same Scheme source].  C lacks good
encapsulation facilities.  I don't want to worry about the size of an
int!  It lacks closures.  It is *not* powerful enough for many things
that I do.  I do use it for device drivers and bootstraps, but C is
too fragile for reasonably sized software systems.

> You just can't *get* good Pascal, Modula,
>Smalltalk, what-have-you implementations on most of the machines I have
>to work with. I'm not going to claim it's even a very good langauge. But
>it's there, and works, everywhere I need it to be. You want to help improve
>things... write some compilers and sell them cheaply.

I have just started a port of Brandeis' Gambit Scheme Compiler to the
Amiga.  Will this help?

[Seriously, let's take the language bashing off-line]

-Ken			kend@data.uucp