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Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 14:48:12 -0800
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
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Subject: Re: Size of an arraylist in bytes
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On 11/20/2011 2:42 PM, Stefan Ram wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj<arne@vajhoej.dk>  writes:
>> C/C++ pointers has certainly caused a lot of problems over the
>> years.
>
>    C serves as a »portable, abstract machine language«, so the
>    C pointers are inherited machine addresses from machine
>    languages, where one can freely add machine addresses and
>    numbers. But, after all, C already adds some type safety and
>    abstraction. So, C still makes sense as the first layer on
>    top of the bare metal. And C cannot be blamed for someone
>    choosing C where it is not appropriate.

My main concern with C's pointers is that they were called "pointers",
not "addresses". They behave far more like assembly language addresses
than like something more abstract, whose only job is to point.

Patricia