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. While this feature could slow things down and increase memory code, I felt that it made it easier to write correct code and to use functions that others had written. Does Julia have a const declaration or other means of controlling or documenting that a given function will or will not change the data passed into it?
Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > -----Original Message----- > From: r-devel-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-boun...@r-project.org] On > Behalf Of oliver > Sent: Friday, March 02, 2012 5:14 PM > To: Douglas Bates > Cc: R-devel > Subject: Re: [Rd] Julia > > On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 11:06:51AM -0600, Douglas Bates wrote: > > My purpose in mentioning the Julia language (julialang.org) here is > > not to start a flame war. I find it to be a very interesting > > development and others who read this list may want to read about it > > too. > [...] > > > Very interesting language. > Thank you for mentioning it here. > > Compiling from the github-sources was easy. > > Will explore it during the next days. > > Seems not to be very specific to statistics, > but good for math in general. > > Not sure, if it might make sense to combine > R and Julia in the long run (I mean: combining via > providing interfaces between them, calling the one via the > other, merging code or using libs from the one or the other > from each side). > > Ciao, > Oliver > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
