Am I a computer scientist now?
No, you need to learn a lot more. Other programming concepts, programming paradigms, algorithms, and many more.
Didn’t expect to see the Drift King here
Drift King? You mean Dan the Villain
as a python script kiddie, this is way over my head, but upvoted because of RT Game
So, googling it, the general premise is you should use smart pointers instead to avoid crashes. Got it.
They all have footguns that cause different crashes.
If you want to do explicit memory access without inevitable safety problems, you need Rust. That’s the whole hype with Rust.
Smart pointers implies C++, which is not the right answer.
Unlike many other programming languages, which are often picked up on the go from tutorials found on the Internet, few are able to quickly pick up C++ without studying a well-written C++ book. It is way too big and complex for doing this. In fact, it is so big and complex, that there are very many very bad C++ books out there. And we are not talking about bad style, but things like sporting glaringly obvious factual errors and promoting abysmally bad programming styles.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list
Considering that most of the “answers” I’ve found on StackOverflow were complete dogshit, I’m wary of this reading list
Worse version of this
Null termination is no longer recommended, use fat pointers instead!
Why would I want to be shown the concept of pointers by an eight year old?
I’ll have you know, she’s canonically 300 years old
🙄
Nah, she’s 5 or younger. She lied about being 6 (school age) to get adopted. It’s a very wholesome story (if you disregard the war, political intrigue and terrorism).
And the fact that Anya’s best friend is trying to break up Anya’s parents because she has a crush on the dad
It’s a good reference (lol) even if it’s getting downvoted
they used to call him the deref king back in college
Wait. It’s been a long time but shouldn’t be int*** -> int** -> int* -> int ?
I think int*** is meant to be pointing at int**, but the image is just unclear about where everything is in perspective.
Pretty sure the image is clear:
int*** -> int* int** -> int Int* -> intClarity doesn’t mean correct. But that’s probably why it’s posted here. 🤷♂️
RT*** isn’t pointing at RT*, he’s pointing at the TV showing RT**. The fact you think otherwise is what makes the image unclear. I’m not sure why you insist on them being wrong.
int** is inside a TV, and persumably int* must be inside another TV(even though uts not edited in). The image perespective is showing one thing inside the other, inside the other. So when when int*** points the TV it reference int**, which reference int* which reference int. Its just edited very bad
What’s the * for again?
It’s to check to see if commenters know how to escape the symbol. Congratulations! You passed!
Source: I made it up.
You don’t need to escape standalone *. At least not on Lemmy.
Well, I thought my misinformation was funny.
I mean, that’s pretty much what happens to me every time I try to use pointers, so the meme checks out.
yep this is just someone misunderstanding pointers lol
That’s not the end of the chain either, right?
Because : int -> &int -> &&int
Or can you not use the address operator like that? It also might be int& &, I failed cs2200 on this exact type of technicality
Now that explain the & part of the pointers that I never really understood.
*x = dereference or “point to”. Treats the variable
xas containing a pointer value. Evaluates to a variable existing at the address inx.&x = reference or “get address of”. Evaluates to the address of
x.They’re complimentary operators, so
*(&x)cancels out and is equvalent to justx.The
&operator references the value.int i; int* p = &i;In C++, the
&at the function argument makes it a reference type (safe pointer).void someFunction(int& refVal) { [...] }As someone who likes working with higher level languages, I never understood the pass by reference or even referencing different pointers. It never stuck out to me as useful in what I want software to do. It’s too close to hardware.
Most of the time you pass by reference for more outputs, or by const ref to avoid copying a big-ass data structure (which is not always straightforward, with structures smaller than a pointer, which are pretty big in 64 bits architecture, you lose more to the ref overhead than to the copy IIRC)
Another reason I commonly see: to change the structure / “main pointer” to a data structure (esp during freeing and cleanup).
if you’re working with higher level languages you pass-by-reference all the time. give a list to a function to modify it? that’s by reference. giving an event handler function to a framework? that’s by reference. setting a property on an object? that’s usually by reference.
the list is the helpful part to understanding it.
it would be terrible if, with bar being a list and foo being a member of the list
if foo in bar: return truemodified the list. So yeah, you want to look at the list not edit the list, it’s a pointer.
Your example doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you modify the entire list by checking if something is in it? Also, you can totally edit the list via a pointer, that’s how you’re supposed to edit the list if you want any performance. Otherwise you’d be copying the list on every modification, which is terribly inefficient
A pointer to the list would allow you to modify whatever’s at that pointer’s address though. If you want to look at the list and not edit it you pass by const reference 99% of the time (or you pass a copy) and if your language doesn’t have that I don’t like it.
I still don’t get the point of pointers.
I want my language to pass by reference. I give a variable to a function and the variable in the function scope should be a reference to the same place in memory as the original variable.
How can pointers help me here? What value does it provide? Genuine question.
I want my language to pass by reference. I give a variable to a function and the variable in the function scope should be a reference to the same place in memory as the original variable.
I’m not even a C++ wizard or anything (though it’s my most advanced language) so I’m not gonna argue that is good or bad, that sounds fine to me for a wide range of applications already.
But the way is see it, pointers kinda allow you to use “raw memory” which is an actual thing that’s gonna be handled by the program one way or another, and it’s a way to relatively refer to memory for example. As some guy on stackoverflow put it “That guy at the end for the bar” vs “Bob” can be very useful. Especially when using data structures you don’t know the size of at compile time.
other way round surely? if you want to modify the original object, use a pointer. if you don’t, use a copy.
Reference values are quite useful, such as:
double valOut; if (parseDouble(valOut) == 0) { //Argument of parseDouble is ref type, no & needed for input, no exceptions needed for error handling [...] //No error, code executed normally } else { [...] //Erroreus input }
Rumble Tumble Games in the wild
Seeing him break containment is wild
C# delegates enter the chat and nod.
Real talk: is there any practical use-case for
T***of any pointee type?Dynamically allocated multidimensional arrays.
Where?
In the C programming language. Or do you mean which C project specifically? Because as Technus surmises in their response, it’s usually a better idea to set up aliases (
typedefs or heck, evens) so that you’re offloading some of the mental strain keeping track of the layers, and that’s likely to be what happens in production code.But the underlying data type is still
T***.deleted by creator
Ah right, so that would be a 3D array.
T*is a single row ofTT**is a list of rowsT***is a list of “layers” in the third dimension
This would be incredibly hazardous to pass around as a bare pointer with no context, though. I’d expect to see this in a
structthat, at minimum, also includes fields for the size of each dimension.This
SpartaC. We live for danger.
Tesseract Array
Why should the left one in the rectangle be int**? It doesn’t make sense to me, they are both clearly just int*
What am i missing?
I they’re supposed to be pointing at each other but the edit didn’t really work because his arm is pointing too far away
Perspective innit
The placement of the labels is a bit sloppy but I think it tracks. The character in the middle (int*) is pointing at int, then the one on the left (int**) is pointing at the middle one (int*), etc
What I want to know: what is that shirt and where do I get it?
He dereferenced a pointer to the 1970s and retrieved the shirt that way.
So it’s like a mystical artifact of the computational Big Bang? You deref a pointer to the very beginning of Unix time and bam, suddenly you’re styling like Richard Stallman?
So, confusing, nonetheless.
