On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 02:44:20PM -0400, Joel Young wrote: > From: Brian McNamara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > to think deeply about it though; it is unclear to me if the FC++ > > implicit assumption of 'value semantics' (FC++ doesn't allow (mutable) > > reference parameters) will throw a wrench in the works. It is also > > I tried using FC++ a while ago for flexibly expressing and passing > around linear algebra pipelines and I found this lack of mutable > reference parameters to be highly constraining and insanely frustrating. > I wanted to be able to take a reference to a vector as a parameter and > return that same vector, mutated, as a return value. I started to hack > FC++ to remove the const on the references but after a bit gave up.
Yes... square peg, round hole. (You can use pointers, but this sometimes turns existing code into mess of "&"s, "*"s, and "compose(dereference)"s.) An open question (which someone on the list suggested) is whether monads will provide a convenient interface to bring mutation cleanly back into the mix. That's what happens, e.g., in Haskell. But the monad stuff in FC++ is really new (and monads are still pretty new to me), so it isn't yet clear if/how this may address the issue. -- -Brian McNamara ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
