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From: a311581@ventures.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Kevin Cline)
Subject: Re: Easily-Read C++?
Message-ID: <CxoLLu.Av3@uunet!aadt>
Sender: a311581@ventures (Kevin Cline)
Organization: American Airlines Decision Technologies
References: <3719k1$11gt@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> <85C92963672@annwfn.com>
 <EMERY.94Oct12165432@goldfinger.mitre.org>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 21:13:06 GMT
Date: 1994-10-14T21:13:06+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <EMERY.94Oct12165432@goldfinger.mitre.org>, emery@goldfinger.mitre.org (David Emery) writes:
|> The ambiguity 'inherent' in declarations such as
|> 	char * foo;
|> 	char ** foo;
|> 	char foo[];
|> 	char *foo[];
|> causes problems for C tools.  Even though each of the above is
|> 'unambiguous', common usage means that any of these can be used to
|> represent the others.   At least one tool I know of (an RPC generator
|> for C) requires the user to disambiguate some of the above
|> declarations, to make sure that the tool generates the right code.
|> 
These declarations are not equivalent.  The first is equivalent to the third,
and the second to the fourth.

The equivalence of C pointers and arrays is unfortunate.  It is maintained
by C++ for backward compatibility reasons.  Most C++ applications use
a library template array class instead of C arrays.

Kevin Cline