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  1. Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
  2. Path: sparky!uunet!europa.asd.contel.com!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!yale.edu!yale!gumby!destroyer!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!jensen.cs.utah.edu!u-dmfloy
  3. From: u-dmfloy%jensen.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Daniel Floyd)
  4. Subject: Re: Most difficult part of learning C?
  5. Date: 27 Aug 92 08:59:08 MDT
  6. Message-ID: <1992Aug27.085909.5817@hellgate.utah.edu>
  7. Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
  8. References: <1992Aug25.180919.10370@samba.oit.unc.edu> <behrenss.714775792@hphalle6> <chuckb.714781695@milton> <17g9mlINNsu1@early-bird.think.com>
  9. Lines: 19
  10.  
  11. In article <17g9mlINNsu1@early-bird.think.com> barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
  12. >In article <chuckb.714781695@milton> chuckb@milton.u.washington.edu (Chuck Bass) writes:
  13. >>I would bet that assembly language programmers have no problem
  14. >>picking up C's notion of pointers.
  15. >
  16. >I disagree.  Assembly programmers are used to pointers being addresses, and
  17. >arithmetic on pointers being address arithmetic.  They're probably the ones
  18. >who get most confused by C's automatic scaling during ptr+integer
  19. >calculations, and don't understand why p+=sizeof(*p) doesn't do what they
  20. >expect.
  21. >Barry Margolin
  22. >barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar
  23.  
  24. I have to agree and disagree here.  I learned assembly language before C
  25. which gave me a good grasp on the concept or "notion" of pointers.
  26. This helped; unfortuneately, I still fell prey to C's automatic scaling
  27. with pointer arithmetic as Barry suspected.
  28.  
  29. Dan Floyd
  30.