Pointers in anything other than the very lowest-level-touching-the-metal code are an abomination. They cause far more confusion and grief than they ever help. Yes, there are situations in which the best way to address a problem is to pass a pointer around. However, in this day and age of multi-gigabyte ram sticks, I'd rather bloat up a program's ram usage with maybe unnecessary copies of large objects than dick around with pointers.
You should talk to my students who just discovered how their 3x3 tic-tac-toe program had some "issues" when they tried 10x10. Understanding the difference between stack allocation and heap allocation, understanding the overhead of creating objects, understanding how to use structure sharing, understanding destructive mutation: all crucial for non-trivial programs. Multi-gigabyte ram sticks buy you nothing on real-world problems.
Nothing wrong with teaching pointers in Java or your other favorite modern language. They're just called reference types. But teaching malloc/free or retain/release, now that's crazy.;-)
IANAA (I Am Not An Astronaut) but another paper in that Journal of Cosmology issue suggests that astronauts go out and stay for a while before coming back:
Includes the details of the Tinsley matches and Tinsley's untimely death. Interesting for people interested in the effects of technology on human societies, as well as some of the technical aspects of the program (as it was in 1997).
Slashdot Mirror
For example, check out the work of Moon Duchin and the Matrix Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts: http://sites.tufts.edu/gerryma... Chronicle of Higher Ed profile: https://www.chronicle.com/arti... And other mathematicians also: http://www.ams.org/publication...
It's the modern CueCat.
Now they just have to get Wired to bundle one with every copy of the magazine.
Pointers in anything other than the very lowest-level-touching-the-metal code are an abomination. They cause far more confusion and grief than they ever help. Yes, there are situations in which the best way to address a problem is to pass a pointer around. However, in this day and age of multi-gigabyte ram sticks, I'd rather bloat up a program's ram usage with maybe unnecessary copies of large objects than dick around with pointers.
You should talk to my students who just discovered how their 3x3 tic-tac-toe program had some "issues" when they tried 10x10. Understanding the difference between stack allocation and heap allocation, understanding the overhead of creating objects, understanding how to use structure sharing, understanding destructive mutation: all crucial for non-trivial programs. Multi-gigabyte ram sticks buy you nothing on real-world problems.
Nothing wrong with teaching pointers in Java or your other favorite modern language. They're just called reference types. But teaching malloc/free or retain/release, now that's crazy. ;-)
Mars Base First: A Program-level Optimization for Human Mars Exploration, Douglas W. Gage, Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 12, 3904-3911.
A preemptive appeal to recursive plugin-ing. Beautiful!
GNUEMACS Not Used Except By Middle Aged Computer Scientists
Jonathan Schaeffer 's book about the development of Chinook (from 1997):
S upremacy/dp/0387949305
http://www.amazon.com/One-Jump-Ahead-Challenging-
Includes the details of the Tinsley matches and Tinsley's untimely death. Interesting for people interested in the effects of technology on human societies, as well as some of the technical aspects of the program (as it was in 1997).