- Problem with pointer semantics

From: [at]} <Rex>
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:34:06 -0500

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        Two comments arrived as I was writing or sending my last reply. Wojtek brings up a serious issue. I wonder what they teach students about this.

        Wojtek brought up the problem of dynamic variables withing records. It doesn't matter whether the records themselves are arrays. Assignment still mangles the contents by aliasing and destroying pointers. If I'm not mistaken, this is a problem.

        To tell the truth, I don't remember how I handle that situation except to muddle through and try to keep track of the problem within. I suppose one can label the type definitions and variable names as containing dynamic structures. Maybe variables and types that should not be assigned could start with an 'x' or 'X'. My suggestion for a compiler feature suddenly seems difficult to implement.

        Wikipedia has a good explanation of Hungarian notation. It's usually associated with the C language. It's unpopular because a lot of ugly type information is typically encoded in variable names in a desperate attempt to avoid type errors.

Rex Couture

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Received on Wed Jun 21 2006 - 00:34:06 UTC