The paper mentions fat pointers in passing, not putting the term in quotes, not defining it, and not giving a citation -- which makes it clear that the term was already well established at the time.
edit: Pascal pointers were just a location and size, however, not a slice-type fat pointer; however, I have always heard of any pointer containing more information than a memory address referred to as a fat pointer (except tagged pointers). YMMV.
They even link to it.
The difference is massive. Bright's idea would allow me to use existing interfaces with fixed structure: as long as I know the declared length of an array, I could pass a fat pointer to a function that accepts one. The Cello approach would require me to modify the interface to accommodate the new size header that is packed with the array. ABI break, not compatible with existing C code and libraries.
One could justify the name of fat pointer, the other is really just arrays with headers.
Isn't the entire point of the article that this is not the case?
My understanding is that a Cello array is laid out like this:
<metadata header>.<actual payload data in standard C format>
^
|
this pointer is what you pass to existing C code
If I pick up some library (or system call interface..), and it uses this structure
struct foo {
struct bar a;
char b[64];
};
If I had actual fat pointers, then the size would be simply passed together with the pointer and I wouldn't have to have modify structures to accommodate an extra field. Of course, I can't pass these pointers to functions that expect normal pointers, but it wouldn't make sense to do that anyway, and if implemented right, doing that would require me to misdeclare a function. You would pass normal pointers to old C code that expects and deals with normal pointers.
It's true that the internal array inside a struct cannot magically become a Cello fat pointer. So yes, you cannot pass a pointer to that array into a Cello function that expects a fat pointer, but that's the opposite of "pass normal pointers to old C code".