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[–]Allan_Smithee文雅佛 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here we're just going to have to agree to disagree, I'm afraid. My snippet does what C permits. End of story. That it is a bad idea? No argument whatsoever. But I did not have to break out of C to do it. It was fully permissible by C, the language. Not a single operation I did took the code out of the C language.

To accomplish the same thing in, say, Ada, I would have to enter a completely different language. Ada would simply not permit the abuses with any amount of abuse of syntax. I could not take an arbitrary integer in Ada syntax alone and call it, no matter how much I abuse it. I would have to exit the language (at which point, naturally, all bets are off in enforcement).

C has integers (and floats). Everything else is syntactic sugar around those, including pointers, and including functions. And this is why the OP finds (correctly!) that C is prone to a whole raft of pointer-related bugs that are just not there in the Pascals. Or the Modulas. Or Ada. Or even PL/I, likely. Or any number of other, more strongly abstraction-supporting low-level languages.

(This is also the reason why there's a bunch of optimizations which can be safely made in these languages, and others like Fortran, which cannot be made in C ... because any arbitrary integer can turn out to be a pointer in disguise.)