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Pointers: good idea or bad idea?
Angel Russell
Carter Brown
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.
Daniel Williams
tard
Justin Watson
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.
Tyler Wood
>breathing
>good idea or bad idea
Jaxon Bennett
It is the casual filter of computer programming.
Kayden Evans
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.
Chase Anderson
I love explicit pointers. IMO I believe you should either see them there, or be unable to tell they are there.
Luis Evans
>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.
Austin Cox
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?
Isaiah Moore
They are just less functional than C/++
Easton Rivera
They use reference semantics.
With mutability too, which makes their behavior less predictable. Don't like it.
Jaxson Perry
java and javascript just use forced const pointers
Luke Sanchez
Hypertext
Good idea or bad idea
Camden Watson
What do you mean by less predictable?
David Gray
see:
Sebastian Butler
bad idea
Logan Collins
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.
Michael Hughes
Yes. Hyperjavacancer - no.
Jason Nelson
How else would you reference a block of memory you fucking retard?
Carter Sullivan
bad idea
Isaiah Davis
Java has pointers since version 8.
Ethan Myers
How else do you suggest implementing cons cells?
Strings?