Re: Is pointer programming even necessary?
On Mar 31, 3:30 pm, Juha Nieminen <nos...@thanks.invalid> wrote:
Danno wrote:
I have decided that this year, I will refresh my C++ skills since they
are old and brittle. I have moved onto other languages over the past
10-15 years or so, and all the languages I have taken to don't have
the pointer logic associated with it (Java, Ruby, etc). I can't say
that I missed it. So my question is simple, is pointer programming
still viable or even necessary?
Do those languages offer the versatility of iterator-based
generic algorithms? Can you, for example, use the exact same
function to sort an array of integers and a double-ended queue
of floats? Can you, for example, use the exact same function
to iterate through an array of chars, a list of complex
numbers or a balanced binary tree containing your own type of
objects, and have to function return the sum of all the
elements? Can you create your own innovative data container
and have those exact same functions perform those operations
on it?
Ok, granted, I don't know if you can do that with Ruby. I know
you can't do that with Java.
I don't know about Ruby, but I know that this sort of thing is
no problem with Java---for most everyday jobs like this, in
fact, the Java collections library (and especially the concept
of iterators in Java) is far superior to the STL.
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