Gail wrote:

> How often does a C/C++ programmer really need a function pointer?

Hopefully very rarely...

>> Which one is FALSE? Is that 0 or 1? I know it's one or the other, but 
>> I can never ever remember which - and it's kind of important!
> 
> 0. Any other value is true.

I remember that 0 is one thing and everything else is the opposite. But 
I can never remember which is which.

>> What insane nutcase thought that making assignment an expression as a 
>> good idea? Seriously, WTF? That's excellent. So if I say "if (x = 
>> 5)..." then my program will silently fail to work correctly, and I'll 
>> probably spend hours if not days trying to figure out why.
> 
> Most compilers will warn about that these days.
> It's the same in Java, the same in C#

In Java, unless x happens to be a bool, you'll get a compile-time error. 
In C it's a perfectly valid construct.

>> Pointers in general usually result in disaster. I constantly get the 
>> syntax wrong for pointer types, pointer dereferencing, and pointer 
>> creation.
> 
> So don't use them. As Warp and others have shown, it's not necessary in 
> any way to use pointers.

It is in C. If you want printf() to print a string for you, you must 
pass a pointer to a string.

Maybe this is one of the things they actually fixed in C++...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message