Here's a specific example of how this works for me. I have a chess board
represented as a 64 element array of points:
type Point struct {
*Piece // nil for no piece
AbsPoint
}
// Absolute Point represents a specific point on the board.
type AbsPoint struct {
File uint8
Rank uint8
}
type Piece struct {
Kind
Orientation
Base Kind
Moved bool `json:"-"`
}
type Kind int
const (
King Kind = iota + 1
Queen
Rook
Bishop
...
Often I'll be iterating over a subset of points on the board and want to
check what kind of piece is there. The pointer shortcut (and struct
embedding) definitely cleans up my code.
for _, point := range set {
if point.Piece != nil {
if (point.Kind == King) && (point.Moved == false) && (point.Orientation
== mover) {
// do something
break
}
}
}
// instead of
for _, point := range set {
if point.Piece != nil {
if (*(point.Piece).Kind == King) && (*(point.Piece).Moved == false) &&
(*(point.Piece).Orientation == mover) {
// or if (point.Piece->Kind == King) && (point.Piece->Moved == false)
&& (point.Piece->Orientation == mover) {
// do something
break
}
}
}
Given more pieces than regular chess this kind of logic happens many times
and I appreciate the reduced word count. For a newcomer it may be
surprising and require a type lookup, but newcomers aren't maintaining the
code.
Matt
On Monday, December 18, 2017 at 3:05:54 PM UTC-6, jlfo...@berkeley.edu
wrote:
>
>
>
> On Monday, December 18, 2017 at 12:12:22 PM UTC-8, Dave Cheney wrote:
>>
>> It's true it is an exception, it's one of the few cases where the
>> language adds a pinch of syntactic sugar to make the experience more
>> pleasurable.
>>
>
> I'd describe this more as removing a pinch of syntactic sugar.
>
> I can imagine without this the number one oft repeated feature request
>> would be to _not_ have to write (&t).m() all the time when you just wanted
>> to write t.m().
>>
>
> Maybe so, but you know where that leads. Soon those people will start
> complaining about the requirement for explicit type conversions too.
>
> Anyway, thanks for confirming my reaction.
>
> Jon
>
>
>
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