I have a question for all the programming enthusiasts out here. The pointers has always been there in the programming world. Like in C,C++ which has got a explicit pointer support. In java explicit pointer support is not there, but internally the Java system uses pointers. Can there be a scope a programming language to be developed not to have pointer aliasing at all, in practical world?
the possibility of creating a programming language without pointer aliasing
2.4k Views Asked by Maverick At
4
There are 4 best solutions below
2
On
Programming without Pointer Variables describes using recursively defined data types instead of pointers in algorithms.
The presence of pointer variables in high level programming languages constitutes an artifact originally introduced to support the representation of recursive data structures.
0
On
If you want to eliminate the problem of aliasing, I suggest you look into purely functional programming languages that prohibit mutating structures, such as Haskell, or languages where collections are copy-on-write, such as J.
0
On
If your language has arrays, and you can index those arrays with integer values, you have in effect aliasing within the array .
In general, this is true of any associative structures that maps a key to a value (arrays are a special case). In effect, if your program is Turing capable and can generate keys, you can't prove generated keys don't "alias".
I think a language without some type of associative lookup is likely to be pretty useless in practice.
If you don't want to be bitten by this, you'll have to make your associative structures immutable. In that case, you still have aliasing, but you can't be surprised by the value you fetch.
Stack based languages are turing complete but have no pointers and no memory aliasing.
If your stack based language allows you to interpret a value on the stack as a point on the stack, you could get problems similar to those introduced by pointer aliasing, but that need not be an allowable operation.