Re: Re: Learning a new language every year can be dangerous.

Ron Jeffries wrote:
> Well, I don't remember all the things I needed to do and which ones
> bit me, but, for example, I wanted to read in huge blocks of data
> from the disc, and then do things like in-memory joins, mapping all
> the accesses by the equivalent of pointer arithmetic, moving big
> chunks of data to output file buffers, and such.
> 
> But maybe I just didn't look at the right things, it was a while
> back.

You can always do pointer arithmetic with integer offsets into a
gigantic array and with explicit encode-decode steps.  It just sucks.
If you want to do that sort of thing some sort of pointer arithmetic
primitive is useful, even if it's just "I want to do arithmetic in this
big chunk of stuff here, not everywhere in the program"; Common Lisp's
subarrays (which can start at some other point in another array, for
example, avoiding memory allocation) might have been sufficient, or you
might have had to do something more cute.  Hard to say for sure.

Graham

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