Yes, you can do crazy shit if you try hard enough, but every reasonable programmer would access foo->child->b als foo->child->b and not via that crazy LISPy expression.
By question was: Why would you have a pointer to a memory address that itself only holds a pointer somewhere else?
So far the only reasonable explanation is from @Victoria@lemmy.blahaj.zone:
That’s not a pointer to another pointer, but a pointer to a data structure that happens to contain another pointer.
The distinction is meaningless in the land of Opcode’s and memory addresses
For example, a struct is just an imaginary “overlay” on top of a contiguous section of memory
Say you have a struct
struct Thing { int a; int b; Thing* child; } Thing foo {}You could easily get a reference to
foo->child->bby doing pointer arithmetic*((*((*foo) + size(int)*2)) +size(int))(I’ve not used C much so I’ve probably got the syntax wrong)
Yes, you can do crazy shit if you try hard enough, but every reasonable programmer would access
foo->child->balsfoo->child->band not via that crazy LISPy expression.By question was: Why would you have a pointer to a memory address that itself only holds a pointer somewhere else?
So far the only reasonable explanation is from @Victoria@lemmy.blahaj.zone: