26 Apr
2020
26 Apr
'20
12:40 p.m.
"Brian L. Stuart" <blstuart(a)bellsouth.net> wrote:
On Saturday, April 25, 2020, 09:52:45 AM EDT, Hellwig
Geisse <hellwig.geisse(a)mni.thm.de> wrote:
Algol 68 had a concept "deproceduring" similar to
"dereferencing". If you
think of
foo(arg)
where plain "foo" is a pointer to a function and adding the parentheses
does the call, then it's the same with a procedure name or with
a function pointer.
This is pretty much what BLS said. Thinking of [] and () as operators
is explicit in C++ (for good and for ill).
Arnold
On Sa, 2020-04-25 at 09:11 -0400, Noel Chiappa
wrote:
This is the way that I've taken to looking at it for the
last 10 years or so. In fact, I see it as the same thing
as an array. Specifically, I've taken to thinking of []
as a postfix indexing operator and () as a postfix
calling operator, and the thing on the left is a pointer
in both cases.
BLS
Two very different things are happenging, but
with the shorthand notation,
they share an identical representation. And for what? To save three characters?
The subject can be looked at from another angle. Consider
the call f(42). This might be read as first naming f (and
thus constructing a pointer to f) and then calling the
function which the pointer is pointing to.