Timeline for Term of art for ontological evasion
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 16 at 16:52 | comment | added | user6527 | @Rushi it might help if you could distinguish how "ontological evasion" differs from "abstraction" (in the CS sense) - at the moment it isn't clear what you really mean. FWIW I would delete the stuff about programming languages, I don't think that is helping. | |
| May 16 at 16:52 | comment | added | Rushi | I will add clarifications to the question in a bit... but bit tight for time now. Your last statement Some like some dont I can heartily agree with. The rest is a loooooong story and not very appropriate here | |
| May 16 at 16:48 | comment | added | user6527 | @Rushi I disagree, you can teach linked lists in Java perfectly well without pointers. In Java the details are abstracted away but linked list diagrams are still perfectly understandable if you know a reference tells you where to find an object (somewhere). The details of the actual memory address is irrelevant, and not usually shown in the diagram. BTW I was originally an electronic engineer and from a low-level C background, but I now teach Java/C/C++/whatever programming to computer scientists. Some like abstractions, some like to keep it concrete, best if you can do both. | |
| May 16 at 16:46 | comment | added | Rushi | Anyways... C++ (and C#) are the examples of better behaved languages. Its Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript etc that are the problem cases, in that the programmer needs to understand the standard linked list diagrams without being given the ontology to understand it. SO if you want to call it an abstraction its a failed (leaky) abstraction | |
| May 16 at 16:45 | comment | added | user6527 | @Rushi that is better, but the point is that references and pointers are not the same thing in C++, avoiding pointer notation is a USE of references, but it isn't the only use and there are other fundamental differences (such as the compiler won't let you create an uninitialised reference, and that references don't have any memory allocated to them) that means they have other uses for which pointers are a poor substitute. | |
| May 16 at 16:42 | comment | added | Rushi | "elided pointers are called references" [from your other comment] Ok I was being a bit fast and loose. Slightly more expanded it would be something like "... C++ references allow the programmer to elide the star (*)... which among other things means it takes care of the fact that «p != NULL and use *p is builtin»" | |
| May 16 at 16:37 | history | answered | user6527 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |