Mark Schoonover wrote:
Perl has references, but I'm not exactly sure if they're just like C
pointers.
I understood them to be more like "pass by name" than pointers per se.
I.e., more like in Tcl putting the name of a variable in a string. I
could be wrong, but I thought the reference was a reference to a
variable rather than a value.
I didn't know Java had pointers!
Sure. What do you think "new" returns?
So, what's the problem with Java
schools if the exact same curriculum can be taught with Java as can be done
with C. I'm now under the impression that Java pointers are somehow
different than C. Since I don't know Java, I'm a tad clueless...
Java pointers are more usually called "references", which are pointers
without pointer arithmetic.
But semantically, Java and C have very similar pointer semantics as long
as you actually stick within the defined semantics of C and don't do
things like run off the end of an array, cast a pointer to one thing
into a pointer to a different thing, and so on.
I.e., if in C you represented a pointer as a segment and an offset, you
could do the same thing in Java by represting a pointer as an array and
index.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
It's not feature creep if you put it
at the end and adjust the release date.
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