Reality drives me to write less clean code, sorry for mistakenly posting in D.announce

[Mike Parker]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Mike Parker wrote:
>> davidl wrote:
>>>
>>> First practice:
>>>
>>> char[] text;
>>> char* p;
>>> char* end;
>>>
>>
>> Pointer arithmetic in D is a no-no, unless you are using memory 
>> allocated outside of the GC. 
> 
> That's news to me.  There's nothing wrong with using pointers, it's just 
> more verbose and error prone than foreach.

Of course there's nothing wrong with /using/ pointers, but pointer 
arithmetic is one item in a list of 'Undefined Behavior' regarding 
pointers to GC memory. See the page 
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/garbage.html (section titled Pointers and 
the Garbage Collector).

This isn't really an issue in the present since the current GC doesn't 
move anything around, AFAIK. But it's still a bad habit to get into (or 
a good one to get out of for people with C backgrounds) and doesn't do 
much for future-proofing.