• Lightfire228@pawb.social
    0·
    12 days ago

    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->b by doing pointer arithmetic

    *((*((*foo) + size(int)*2)) +size(int))

    (I’ve not used C much so I’ve probably got the syntax wrong)

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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:

      • arrays of function pointers
      • pass by reference of a pointer