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Re: Naive pointer question ? [message #28942 is a reply to message #28938]

Tue, 22 January 2002 14:34

James Kuyper
Messages: 425
Registered: March 2000

Senior Member

trouble wrote:

> From my understanding, pointers are useful in C where you have the
> option of passing by value or by reference, but in IDL it seems one

That's one use of pointers. Another, more important one, is in data
structures. A single piece of data can be referred to in two or more
different structures by have a pointer to that data stored in each
structure. In languages without pointers, you can often achieve similar
effects by storing an array index instead of a pointer. However, code
that uses this index needs to know both the array name in order to use
the index to retrieve the value it refers to. That's far clumsier than
the equivalent pointer code.

For instance, try implementing a linked list without pointers (or
equivalent constructs), and then compare the resulting code to the
equivalent code in C. Of course, to appreciate how much simpler the C
code is, you have to be fairly familiar with C, otherwise it will just
look like gibberish.

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[Message index]

		Re: Naive pointer question ? By: James Kuyper on Wed, 23 January 2002 08:02
		Re: Naive pointer question ? By: David Fanning on Tue, 22 January 2002 21:03
		Re: Naive pointer question ? By: Bhautik Joshi on Tue, 22 January 2002 20:51
		Re: Naive pointer question ? By: James Kuyper on Tue, 22 January 2002 14:34
		Re: Naive pointer question ? By: Paul van Delst on Tue, 22 January 2002 14:14

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