On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 07:33:10PM -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > On 12-03-05 6:58 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote: > >Hi Oliver, > > > >On 03/05/2012 09:08 AM, oliver wrote: > >>On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 03:53:28PM +0000, William Dunlap wrote: > >>>I haven't used Julia yet, but from my quick reading > >>>of the docs it looks like arguments to functions are > >>>passed by reference and not by value, so functions > >>>can change their arguments. My recollection from when > >>>I first started using S (in the course of a job helping > >>>profs and grad students do statistical programming, c. 1983) > >>>is that not having to worry about in-place algorithms changing > >>>your data gave S a big advantage over Fortran or C. > >>[...] > >> > >> > >>C also uses Call-by-Value. > > > >C *only* uses Call-by-Value. > > While literally true, the fact that you can't send an array by > value, and must send the value of a pointer to it, kind of supports > Bill's point: in C, you mostly end up sending arrays by reference. [...]
It's a problem of how the term "reference" is used. If you want to limit the possible confsion, better say: giving the pointer-by-value. Or: giving the address-value of the array/struct/... by value. To say, you give the array reference is a shorthand, which maybe creates confusion. Just avoiding the word "reference" here would make it more clear. AFAIK in C++ references are different to pointers. (Some others who know C++ in detail might explain this in detail.) So, using the same terms for many different concepts can create a mess in understanding. Ciao, Oliver ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
