3.6 Summary

In this chapter the use of FLI pointers was examined. A number of FLI functions useful for copying, creating and testing the properties of a pointer were presented. The use of the dereference function for obtaining the value pointed to by a pointer was examined, as was the coercing of a pointer—namely dereferencing a pointer to an object in a manner which returns the value found there as a different type. Finally, an example of the use of the with-coerced-pointer macro was given to illustrate the use of temporary pointers for efficient memory management.

In the next chapter some advanced topics of the FLI are examined in greater detail.