On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, William Chops Westfield wrote:

*>    You know, I think the two of you are being a little harsh here.  In my
*>    experience, the concept of pointers has a learning curve that's
*>    practically a step function; there's a "moment of truth" in which the
*>    idea suddenly goes from incomprehensible to blindingly obvious.
*>
*>I agree.  It took me years of fiddling with assembly language (on a
*>system with large memory addresses that commonly manipulated addresses)
*>before it clicked that those addresses WERE these "pointer" things that
*>HL Languages kept mentioning (they never mentioned them that way in the

Grin. There is also that second threshold when function pointers are
introduced. Wrapping one's mind around that (especially in the context of
variable arity) is a much steeper step than pointers imho. At least for me
it was. I had exposure to pointers and computed jumps/calls in assembly
before learning C but I know CS people who hit a sort of wall at the time.

Peter

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