Fabian - Many thanks for your comments. This was very helpful. (c) if I want to write code now that shouldn't break with 0.5, what should > I do? >
I think when you need a copy, just surround your getindex with a copy function. (e.g. copy(x[:,10]) instead of x[:,10]). But this would lead me to make two copies. I was more interested in seeing whether there is a guideline on how to write code now so it doesn't have to be rewritten for 0.5. Regarding this change I am also more on the sceptical side. I would very much prefer a copy-on-write like solution like Matlab and R provide, but I don't know if and how this would be possible to implement, so I don't raise my voice here. To me the main benefit of this change is that it drove the main developers to make array views much more performant and first class members of julia. As Tim Holy mentioned, the actual change seems to be be very small, but it needed and still needs a lot of work to make it possible. My own scepticism comes from the idea that using immutable objects throughout prevents bugs and one should only use mutable objects sparingly (primarily for performance - but I thought it shouldn't be the default) Christoph
