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- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!vaxeline.ftp.com!clennox
- From: clennox@vaxeline.ftp.com (Systems Anarchist)
- Subject: Re: Pointer/address reluctance
- Message-ID: <1992Aug13.231258.25223@vaxeline.ftp.com>
- Organization: FTP Software, Inc., Wakefield, MA
- References: <l8kteaINNp2c@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
- Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 23:12:58 GMT
- Lines: 16
-
- In article <l8kteaINNp2c@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> linden@positive.Eng.Sun.COM (Peter van der Linden) writes:
- >Can anyone explain the reluctance that some of the experts here
- >have in equating "pointer" with "address"?
-
- "Pointer" and "address" are not equivalent. "Address" is the location
- of memory in hardware; a "pointer" is a higher-level construct
- intended to be machine-independent. An address can be used as a
- pointer, but a pointer is not always an address. For example, the
- PDP-10, an architecture which is near and dear to my heart, is a
- word-addressed machine, each word being 36-bits long. On such an
- architecture, multiple different chars variables could share the same
- word address; a char pointer is therefore an address combined with a
- bit-offset.
-
- --
- %SYSTEM-F-ANARCHISM, the operating system has been overthrown
-