On 07/28/2013 01:17 PM, Gábor Lehel wrote:
On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Daniel Micay <[email protected]> wrote:
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`.
FWIW I prefer the terms box and reference. I don't really understand the
idea that only * is 'semantically a pointer' though.
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