I agree with this sentiment (as obvious from my own post). Since the language has no dynamically allocated memory (in the "malloc" sense), I don't think it makes sense to use _pointers_, when references would be clearer. The fact that sscanf already does this is a good reason to make it an official implementation (that also fixes the problem some people have with 'sscanf' not being a valid Pike method, since it then could be :-).
/ David Hedbor
Previous text:
2003-04-16 01:00: Subject: Pointers/lvalues
Variable pointers would be used like in C. Silly example:
Since you talked about an lvalue type, which is what sscanf currently uses, I would have expected a more C++-ish usage, i.e.
int append_to_buf (Stdio.File f, string &buf) { string in = f->read(); buf += in; return sizeof (in); }
... append_to_buf(f, buf); ...
After all, you don't do `sscanf(bla, "%d", &n)' in Pike.
/ Marcus Comstedt (ACROSS) (Hail Ilpalazzo!)