[OT] Dennis Ritchie's proposal for slices in C

[Derek Fawcus]

On Monday, 9 December 2024 at 10:22:19 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Yes, and this kind of makes the point WG14 has no interest 
> fixing the issue, when not even one of the language authors can 
> change their mind.
>
> Note that the languages they designed afterwards, Alef, Limbo 
> and Go, don't have this issue.

Alef was by Phil Winterbottom, not Richie. Richie probably had a 
hand in Limbo (since he wrote the reference manual), but likely 
not in Go.

While Alef did have a form of fat pointer (polymophic type / 
pointer), that seems to have been more akin to "interface{}" / 
aka "any" in Go, in that it carried type information, not bounds. 
I'm guessing that also got used when a Channel was able to carry 
one of a set of types (as opposed to chan of tuple-type).

As far as I can tell from the reference manual, Alef had 
identical array to pointer decomposition as in C.