On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Patrick Walton <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm as sympathetic as anybody to want to reduce the number of pointer types > in the language, as it's folks' #1 complaint about Rust. But I think this > one is probably a necessary evil. > > > Patrick
We can reduce the number of pointer types in the language by describing the language with semantic terms rather than implementation details of the compiler. The safe subset of Rust lacks pointers in the same way that a language like Ruby lacks them. For example, `~[T]` is described as a unique vector, despite being a pointer. It feels like we're going out of our way to make the language complex when we use a term like "borrowed pointer" instead of just calling it a reference like Java. The documentation would be so much simpler if it just referred to references and unique/managed boxes. Rust only has two types that are semantically pointers, `*` and `*mut`. _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
