A Wednesday puzzler

[xwu (Xiaodi Wu)]

@QuinceyMorris

However, I changed my mind before posting, because the semantics would be ambiguous. If the count is 0, is it allowable to access the value at the location pointed to?

Usability of pointers in Swift

I mean, not really. Any attempt to define reasonableness in programming tends to fall apart in the face of the reality of programming. For example, consider this hypothetical C data structure library: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> typedef struct { size_t count; size_t capacity; char bytes[]; } MyTailAllocArray; MyTailAllocArray *MakeArray(size_t size) { MyTailAllocArray *array = malloc(sizeof(MyTailAllocArray) + size); if (array == NULL) { ret…