Re: Warning: Religious naming convention discussion :-) [was: assign help!!]

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <dewar.863448507@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>says Bob Duff, and I agree in theory, but in practice, say pointer to
>most people, and then think of a machine address ... it is that
>perception of connection that causes confusion.

Well, at least we agree "in theory".  ;-)

In practise, I *like* the word pointer (with it's fairly high-level
meaning), and I'm not about to give it up to those who think it means,
merely, "machine address".

Who are these "most people"?  There are a lot of C and C++ programmers
in the world, and yes indeed many of them think pointer=machine address.
Sigh.  They're wrong, of course, since it's not even true in C or C++,
much less Pascal or Ada or Lisp or ....  To paraphrase a recent quote
from you in a different thread: "Get rid of such people, either by
educating them, or by getting rid of them."  Anybody who's got
experience in a language where "pointer" doesn't allow (e.g.) address
arithmetic, and anybody who's programmed in a language where
"everything's a pointer", can understand the difference.

I mean, by your reasoning, we shouldn't call Ada's arrays "arrays",
because they might be confused with C arrays, which are a very low-level
notion indeed!  ;-)  (And, by the way, I have no objection to a language
with associative arrays calling *those* things arrays, even though some
poor, low-level, Ada programmer might think they're getting a contiguous
chunk of storage with random access performance.  ;-))

So I'm sticking to my meaning of "pointer", which I think is shared by
at least a substantial minority of software folk: It's a pointer if it
points -- i.e. if you have reference semantics.  That is, if you modify
what X points to, and what Y points to can see the change, you've got
reference semantics.  That's why I sometimes say, "So-and-so (an index
into an array) points to such-and-such thing (an element of that
array)."  (In fact, I said such things about array indices when I was
programming in assembly language!)

- Bob