[fpc-pascal] Illogical automatic dereferencing
Jürgen Hestermann
juergen.hestermann at gmx.de
Sat Oct 10 17:54:41 CEST 2009
> Also, it is very important to make distinction between static and
> dynamic arrays. For static arrays, compiler knows their exact memory
> location at compile time (modulo situations where static array is part
> of another structure), but for dynamic arrays, compiler only knows
> where in memory is reference (akka pointer) to the contents of that
> array. So, if we wanted to have that distinction on syntax level, we
> would have to use X[1] for static arrays and X^[1] for dynamic arrays.
Exactly!
> Doesn't sound nice, does it?
To me it does, much more as it's now. It would make it clear what kind
of data structure I am working with. What is not nice with it? Now all
these facts are obscured by some background compiler magic and
misinterpretations are generated.
Imagine a highly nested structure of pointers to arrays of pointers to
arrays of pointers..... If you try to write code to access the data you
will soon get lost what to write if you mean some of the arrays or mean
the pointers.
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