Pointers: good idea or bad idea?

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It's just the basic idea of indirection. It's like asking if prime numbers are a good or a bad idea.

Case closed in one post.

tard

They weren't an "idea" like they were planned, its just a side effect of the style of computer we have that reflects into low level languages. Get learnt some more.

>breathing
>good idea or bad idea

It is the casual filter of computer programming.

They’re not a good or bad idea; they’re more or less essential in systems to talk about location

The conversation is whether or not it’s good for a project for programmers to see the pointers or not.

I love explicit pointers. IMO I believe you should either see them there, or be unable to tell they are there.

>The conversation is whether or not it’s good for a project for programmers to see the pointers or not.

Almost always not. We've thoroughly established that programmers cannot be trusted not to fuck things up with pointers, and aliasing makes it difficult/impossible for the compiler to use implicit parallelism.

But what about languages such as Java and Javascript, which don't really have pointers like C and C++ do? Or any other language that doesn't do that?

They are just less functional than C/++

They use reference semantics.
With mutability too, which makes their behavior less predictable. Don't like it.

java and javascript just use forced const pointers

Hypertext
Good idea or bad idea

What do you mean by less predictable?

see:

bad idea

You can reason about a program's behavior more strongly when you explicitly leave out mutability.
With explicit pointers and opt-in reference semantics you can see where values alias so you can better predict when mutation will cause nonlocal changes.

Yes. Hyperjavacancer - no.

How else would you reference a block of memory you fucking retard?

bad idea

Java has pointers since version 8.

How else do you suggest implementing cons cells?
Strings?