If I had a penny for every pixel ... I'd have around $1088. Which I would take, but really it's not enough.
just edited to upscale the image
I don't think I've ever explicitly gone four deep. Two is common enough, and three happens on some rare occasions, but four seems like sheer madness.
Dumb question, but when would you need two deep? Is it when you store a pointer as a field in a struct?
If so, isn't that a massive footgun, because the pointer might go invalid at any point? 🫠
Once your pointer definition looks like a censored swear word you're doing something awful.
In my entire programming career I've used
int **less than a handful of times and I've always been borderline about refactoring when I need it.Okay, but what if you're dealing with a rather high-dimensional tensor? In some kinds of coding it can happen, and you usually don't want to sacrifice performance when it does.
You can also do increasingly elaborate pointer arithmetic, but that seems worse, not better to me.
*char // I heard it from a friend **char //who heard it from a friend ***char // who heard it from another "You were messing around"Me: building a fluent interface framework...
I already support aWrapperOf<T, T, T, T>
User: Can I have aWrapperOf<T, T, T, T, T>because I'm doing something weird?
Me: *sigh* god-damnit. You're right but I still hate it.
int
I am a friend.
Is there a code example of this?
I've been a four-star programmer a few times. Imagine a blocked symmetric matrix where the rows and columns are indexed by triples (u,v,w). The entries are zero whenever u != u' or v != v', and because of symmetry you only store entries with w <= w'. But the range of v depends on the value of u and the range of w on the value of v. So you do
double ****mat = calloc (UMAX, sizeof(*mat)); for (int u = 0; u < UMAX; ++u) { mat[u] = calloc (u + 1, sizeof(**mat)); for (int v = 0; v <= u; ++v) { mat[u][v] = calloc (v + 1, sizeof(***mat)); for (int w = 0; w <= v; ++w) { mat[u][v][w] = calloc (w + 1, sizeof(****mat)); for (int ww = 0; ww <= w; ++ww) mat[u][v][w][ww] = some_function (u, v, w, ww); } } }and weep a little. In reality, this gets a bit optimized by allocating a single chunk of memory and carving that up into the pointer and data arrays, so everything is reasonably close together in memory.
uwu, got it.
My brain hurts
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If you do it with fixed-size arrays you can accomplish multi-dimension with just int*. Lots of pointer arithmetic needed though. Probably still faster than n levels of indirection.
I know a friend who can point you to a region in memory where you can insert your exploit. You're welcome.
