3 ms·

I'm among the people who would have liked to eliminate even this special case and have a convenient postfix derefence for this. So instead of a->b() you'd have

I'm among the people who would have liked to eliminate even this special case and have a convenient postfix derefence for this. So instead of a->b() you'd have a*.b(), and if you need to dereference again, write a**.b() and so on. But as you said, lots of people really seem to hate this kind of thing. Zig is almost there with its dereference syntax, but still kept the magic dereferencing dot.

mananaysiempre 3y ago
Object Pascal strikes again: if a: ^record ... end is a pointer to a record, then a^ is the pointed-to record as a value and a^.b is the way you access a field of it. Incidentally, the authors of Go were asked why they didn’t use a postfix dereference when Sethi noted[1] back in 1981 that C syntax would have been simpler that way, was quoted in Ritchie’s 1993 retrospective[2] on that point, and even their own blog post on declaration syntax pointed out that possibility[3], but IIRC the answer amounted to “but then we wouldn’t have gotten those sweet, sweet C-bandwagon popularity points”. (I also cannot help calling out “Language X” here: One nice approach that nevertheless basically forces implicit dereferencing is that of Algon-68, where all values are constant values; the way to declare a mutable variable is to declare a pointer—a constant value—to a mutable cell; and the way to make the whole thing bearable is to have the compiler infer the minimum possible amount of dereferencing in an expression from the types of the values involved. Then of course it becomes impossible to infer the types, so the ML family goes with the inconvenient dereferencing, and you end up not really using a lot of mutability in ML.) [1] https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380110606 https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380110606 [2] https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/154766.155580 https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/154766.155580 [3] https://go.dev/blog/declaration-syntax https://go.dev/blog/declaration-syntax

mananaysiempre 3y ago

Object Pascal strikes again: if a: ^record ... end is a pointer to a record, then a^ is the pointed-to record as a value and a^.b is the way you access a field of it. Incidentally, the authors of Go were asked why they didn’t use a postfix dereference when Sethi noted[1] back in 1981 that C syntax would have been simpler that way, was quoted in Ritchie’s 1993 retrospective[2] on that point, and even their own blog post on declaration syntax pointed out that possibility[3], but IIRC the answer amounted to “but then we wouldn’t have gotten those sweet, sweet C-bandwagon popularity points”. (I also cannot help calling out “Language X” here: One nice approach that nevertheless basically forces implicit dereferencing is that of Algon-68, where all values are constant values; the way to declare a mutable variable is to declare a pointer—a constant value—to a mutable cell; and the way to make the whole thing bearable is to have the compiler infer the minimum possible amount of dereferencing in an expression from the types of the values involved. Then of course it becomes impossible to infer the types, so the ML family goes with the inconvenient dereferencing, and you end up not really using a lot of mutability in ML.) [1] https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380110606 https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380110606 [2] https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/154766.155580 https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/154766.155580 [3] https://go.dev/blog/declaration-syntax https://go.dev/blog/declaration-syntax