No Pointers?

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 12:25:47AM -0500, Alan Grimes wrote:
> Hey, I was wondering if there were any useful/practical models of
> computation that don't use pointers, as they are understood today.
As far as I know, none of Turing Machines, the Lambda-Calculus,
the Pi-Calculus, Rewrite Logic, Graph Reduction, Abstract State Machines,
or any theoretical model of computation uses "pointers".
Only low-level languages like C or Pascal or FORTH resort to this thing.

Of course, in the _implementation_ of these models, you use pointers.
Pointers are to be used wherever there's a Von Neuman Architecture
computer where a processor accesses memory as a device mapping a bank
of memory addresses to storable contents.

And if pointers are too obvious to you when programming in LISP or ML,
then try programming in Brainfuck or in unlambda.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Long live consumership, which is individual and responsible choice!
Down with citizenship, which is collective and irresponsible choice!