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Null, void, wild, dangling in core C. DOS also had far, near. I believe one of the Windows Visual something platforms had extensions that added another three

Null, void, wild, dangling in core C. DOS also had far, near. I believe one of the Windows Visual something platforms had extensions that added another three or four.

bornfreddy 4y ago
I'll bite. So null is just a special value one can assign to a pointer, marking it not used. In Go this is nil. Void means "absence of type" and is related to pointers only marginally - void* is a pointer to something we don't know a type of. In Go, I guess a pointer to interface{} would be the same? (Not quite, but close) As for wild and dangling pointers (I would argue the are the same - pointers that show somewhere they shouldn't), fair point. Of course one would expect this from a language so many decades younger. But none of these are pointer "types" (far and near arguably are - iirc they determine the size of a pointer - but these four are not). I hope the question on the interviews are posed differently, I for one wouldn't know what you mean.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > As for wild and dangling pointers (I would argue the are the same - pointers that show somewhere they shouldn't), fair point. Of course one would expect this from a language so many decades younger. It’s not due to age, but due to having a GC and being a managed language. I really don’t get all the comparisons of Go to C, the former seems to want to sell itself as a modern C replacement but they are nowhere in the same niche (and that’s ok, there are very few places where a GC can’t work). They just operate by completely different semantics when it comes to pointers.
lenkite 4y ago
I love Golang but its pointers are awful. "Nil is not really Nil" has tripped >1M Go programmers. It's the "trillion dollar" mistake. People make fun out of C++ all the time. Yet, Go has some extraordinary Gotchas of its own. You need to read "The Go Bestiary" to make sure you don't blow your head off.

Null, void, wild, dangling in core C. DOS also had far, near. I believe one of the Windows Visual something platforms had extensions that added another three or four.

bornfreddy 4y ago

I'll bite. So null is just a special value one can assign to a pointer, marking it not used. In Go this is nil. Void means "absence of type" and is related to pointers only marginally - void* is a pointer to something we don't know a type of. In Go, I guess a pointer to interface{} would be the same? (Not quite, but close) As for wild and dangling pointers (I would argue the are the same - pointers that show somewhere they shouldn't), fair point. Of course one would expect this from a language so many decades younger. But none of these are pointer "types" (far and near arguably are - iirc they determine the size of a pointer - but these four are not). I hope the question on the interviews are posed differently, I for one wouldn't know what you mean.

kaba0 4y ago
> As for wild and dangling pointers (I would argue the are the same - pointers that show somewhere they shouldn't), fair point. Of course one would expect this from a language so many decades younger. It’s not due to age, but due to having a GC and being a managed language. I really don’t get all the comparisons of Go to C, the former seems to want to sell itself as a modern C replacement but they are nowhere in the same niche (and that’s ok, there are very few places where a GC can’t work). They just operate by completely different semantics when it comes to pointers.

lenkite 4y ago

I love Golang but its pointers are awful. "Nil is not really Nil" has tripped >1M Go programmers. It's the "trillion dollar" mistake. People make fun out of C++ all the time. Yet, Go has some extraordinary Gotchas of its own. You need to read "The Go Bestiary" to make sure you don't blow your head off.