On Thursday, 30 October 2014 at 08:02:49 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
3. No non-const ref parameters to functions, use pointers.
They want a visible "&" at call site for output parameters.
e.g. "read(&var)" so that you don't have to look the function
up in the docs.
Coming from a Quick/Turbo Basic/Turbo Pascal background, I
never understood the C culture about function parameters.
Just another example of C being unsafe.
C is unsafe, but it is desirable to make it visible at the call
site that you are returning a value through a parameter. I think
it is a good idea to create a special "zero-cost" wrapper type so
that you write:
copy_from_to( input, returns(output) )
I noticed that c++11 has a ref() function:
http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/functional/ref