On Sat, 07 May 2011 21:21:45 +1200, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: : You can manipulate them just fine by moving them : from one place to another: : : a = b : : You can use them to get at stuff they refer to: : : a = b.c : a[:] = b[:]
Surely you can refer to the objects, but you cannot refer to the reference. : You can compare them: : : if a is b: : ... This could be implemented as pointer comparison, but it is not defined as such and there is no requirement that it be. : That's about all you can do with pointers in Pascal, : and I've never heard anyone argue that Pascal pointers : are any more or less abstract than any other piece of : data in that language. In Pascal a pointer is a distinct data type, and you can have variables of a given type or of type pointer to that given type. That makes the pointer a concrete concept defined by the languagedefined by the language. -- :-- Hans Georg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
