dim jungle
hi, i was doing ziglings 61 and i saw that "single-item mutable pointers coerce to single-item pointers pointing to an array of length 1" (why only mutable?) and that "single-item pointers to arrays coerce to slices and many item pointers"
why is it that attempting to cast a single item pointer to a many item pointer is an error? shouldn't the single item pointer coerce to an array pointer which can coerce to a many item pointer?
shell pecan
a wacky side effect of many-item pointers is that they can also point to 0 items
which, by extent, would mean that accessing the first item of a many-pointer with 0 items would be illegal behavior
you can't really tell how many items there are behind a many-item pointer without keeping track of the amount, or by keeping track of the sentinel, or (in some rare cases) with special logic in your program
why is why, i assume, that you can't easily cast a single-item pointer to a many-item pointer, important information would be lost
though you can always @ptrCast, i'm pretty sure
dim jungle
why is why, i assume, that you can't easily cast a single-item pointer to a many...
hm, but isn't that true for all array to manyitem ptr coercions?
shell pecan
yeah, i assume it's a pattern common enough to warrant that
maybe the mental gymnastics between single-item to many-item is too big
coral quiver
the *T -> *[1]T is going away fwiw
shell pecan
right, i wanted to say that but i didn't want to accidentally spread misinfo
shell pecan
the `*T` -> `*[1]T` is going away fwiw
in what issue/discussion was this mentioned?
coral quiver
dim jungle
the `*T` -> `*[1]T` is going away fwiw
woah! okay, that makes sense