On 2011-05-05, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Thu, 05 May 2011 14:14:22 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> On 2011-05-05, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net> wrote:
>>> Grant Edwards wrote:
>>>> The "pass by value" and "pass by reference" parameter passing
>>>> mechanisms are pretty well defined, and C uses "pass by value".
>>>
>>> Yeah, that's kind-a funny, cause I'm one of the guys (old farts) that
>>> helped define them....
>>
>> I give up. You don't seem to understand the C language defintion or
>> what is commonly meant by "pass by reference".
>
>
> In fairness, he's not the only one. M Harris has twice now linked to an
> IBM site that describes pass-by-reference in C in terms of passing a
> pointer to the argument you want as the argument. Admittedly, doing so
> gives you almost the same behaviour, except that you have to dereference
> the pointers yourself.
>
> That's a pretty big difference though, and gets to the core of the
> argument: it's a bit like arguing that manual cars are fitted with
> exactly the same automatic transmission as auto cars, it's just that
> you have to engage the clutch and shift gears yourself.
I like that analogy.
"My car has an automatic transmission except you have to shift
gears yourself with that lever and that it has a clutch operated
by that pedal instead of a hydrostatic torque converter."
--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! ... bleakness
at ... desolation ... plastic
gmail.com forks ...
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
