Yes, and you can do the equivalent of malloc/calloc by asking for new arrays or whatever at run-time. The point is that the student should do this eg they should write their own implementations of a linked list, tree, stack etc before they use Sun's implementations of the container classes.
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ruven E Brooks Sent: 15 January 2008 14:12 To: Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: Programmer education ain't what it used to be In fact, you can easliy teach about pointers and memory management using Java. Simply have them use a large array to simulate physical memory and give them exercises chasing pointers through the array, etc. Unsupported hypothesis: They will actually learn about memory management and pointers faster and easier this way becauses debugging will be easier; addresses will all be integers starting at zero, rather than hex starting at an arbitrary offset. I've even heard of giving exercises like this when teaching C++, before introducing the native pointer constructs, because of the easy of visualizing what is taking place. Ruven Brooks
