Pointers never hurt anybody...
*evil maniacal laughter in the background*
Just look at all modern operating systems
99% of them are written in C.... oh wait... :-)
Pointers at some level are a necessary evil.
In C pointers are a bit scarier than in Java.
However everything is still passed by reference
so you still end up with "pointers" you just cant
hurt yourself so badly :-)
I remember learning C as my first language and
pointers (when your 13 stuff can get confusing;)
just baffled me for a good week. However there
are a lot of benefits to pointers, it just takes
a lot of practice and good coding practice to
not go crazy handling your own memory allocation
and pointer errors.
I have read in several studies that 70-90% of errors
in C programs come from pointers and mishandling of
memory allocation.
The studies varied in their percentages but for a
company like IBM among others performing case studies
to find such a high percentage says that in practice
languages like C should be best left to the gods
and or only projects where speed is of the utmost
need. Even then there are languages such as ADA
which is actually incredibly nice and have awesome
realtime support and a much greater productivity
level than C (which are a few reasons the government
penalizes any govt contractors not using ADA in most
cases)
Pick your poison, C has some extra baggage to deal
with. I love C as it was my first language but at
some point you have to cut your losses and stick
with something you can be productive and deliver
solid products with. I think ColdFusion and Java
are good middle grounds for these :-D
Jeremy Allen
elliptIQ Inc.
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