Conversation
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz@ljs
That's a real book???
When I first heard the word "pointer" I was baffled about what it was until someone explained that it was the same as a memory address in assembly programming. Then it was mostly all obvious.
Why isn't just a section in a C book sufficient...
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Lorenzo Stoakes
ljs
@dougmerritt yes it is and there's complexities around pointers ;)
It is 'just' a memory address, but the type representation can get confusing, and once you get pointers to pointers and above people get confused. Plus there's all the fun of the fair of array params etc.
It is 'just' a memory address, but the type representation can get confusing, and once you get pointers to pointers and above people get confused. Plus there's all the fun of the fair of array params etc.
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DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz@ljs
Well, true; every corner of C has things that are potentially confusing.
For instance, bitfields in a union rather than a struct.
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Jarkko Sakkinen
jarkko
@dougmerritt @ljs if I had exam or work interview question where i was what is a memory address, i would answer one word sentence "nothing." ;-)
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gfaster 
gfaster@tilde.zone
@ljs what about this one? https://tilde.zone/@gfaster/112826091370862642
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gfaster
gfaster@tilde.zone
@ljs It's so wonderfully awful. I learned about it from https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html and I've been looking for a copy ever since.
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gfaster
gfaster@tilde.zone
@ljs I think you'll have a hard time beating some of these
(annotated examples)
https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/code.html
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@dougmerritt @ljs Or maybe it would be fair to say that it is something that CPU asserts. Rest is dependent on wiring and CPU "software-defined memory" (could be also partitioning, like MMUless RISC-V allow to do for protection, not just VM) shenanigans. In that sense it is IMHO non-trivial and continuously redefined topic.
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Lorenzo Stoakes
ljs
@gfaster lol christ... there's a lot of shit books published by the likes of packt out which if you 'look inside' on amazon look very much like print outs + are written terribly (+ wrong about a bunch of things).
And yet have tons of positive reviews...
That's depressing enough as it is. This is just. God.
(I won't name names I don't want to upset anybody I know how hard it is to write books...)
And yet have tons of positive reviews...
That's depressing enough as it is. This is just. God.
(I won't name names I don't want to upset anybody I know how hard it is to write books...)
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