Hello everybody.
My message is for both "Why use pointers to arrays?" and "Illogical
automatic deferencing".
I really don't understand why Pascal "should" include C-style stuff.
PASCAL IS DIFFERENT LANGUAGE THAN C. STOP. Actually I hate that
"C-lovers" that think all languages must use C-style stuff inside any
other languages. I'm using C right now, as well as Pascal, and I
really think that C is a great language for some tasks (i.e.
low-level) but it isn't the panacea ("the solution for everything").
You'll never add C-style stuff inside SQL, do you? So, why do you want
C-style stuff in Pascal?
As I've said, C language is useful sometimes, but it's ugly and prone
to runtime errors. A lot of that runtime errors are compilation-time
errors on Pascal, so they're easer to find and to fix for me (just the
opposite that somebody said in this discussion). That's why I love to
use Pascal. It's less frustrating. A lot.
If you have "p: PINTEGER" then you're assuming you're accessing to ONE
integer. If you need to access to an array of integer then use a
pointer to an array. What's the problem with "p^[3]"? I think it is
better because you see you're accessing to a pointer to an array, and
in most cases it's important to don't forget it.
When I use C, I try to do not use pointers as arrays. I write something as:
/* Useless example function. */
char Fn (int Ndx)
{
char AnArray[500];
char *Pointer;
Pointer = &(AnArray[0]);
return *(Pointer + Ndx); /* instead of "return Pointer[Ndx];" */
}
This is more readable, because "*(Pointer + Ndx)" remembers me that
it's a pointer, not an array, so may be it wasn't assigned and may be
it needs some test before to use it (i.e. "if ( ! Pointer) return
EXIT_FAILURE;" or something).
As conclusion: I think that Pascal is good as it is. Of course it can
evolve to be better, but I think it doesn't need that C-style stuff
(i.e. Object Pascal has it's own approach to OOP keeping the original
"Pascal-style" and I like it much more than C++ and C# [can't say the
same about Objective C ;) ]).
Greetings,
Guillermo "Ñuño" Martínez
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