Douglas Alan wrote:
greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
This holds for *all* languages that I know about, both
static and dynamic.
Then you don't know about all that many languages. There are
languages that use call-by-name, and those that use
call-by-value-return. Some use call-by-need and others do
call-by-macro-expansion. Etc.
I didn't mean that these are the only two parameter passing
mechanisms in existence -- I know there are others.
What I mean is that in all languages I know of that have
by-value or by-reference or both, they behave according to
the definitions I gave. If anyone has a counterexample,
I'll be interested to hear about it.
For
instance, most dialects of Lisp have procedural macros. The calling
semantics of procedural macros are quite different from the calling
semantics of normal functions
Yes, but nobody refers to that as either by-value or
by-reference as far as I know. Lisp people would probably
talk about the parameter being passed either "evaluated"
or "unevaluated".
If I tell you, for instance, that Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript,
Lisp, and CLU all use call-by-sharing, then I have said something that
makes a similarity among these languages easier to state and easier to
grasp.
If you told me they use "assignment by sharing", that would tell me
a lot *more* about the language than just talking about parameter
passing.
--
Greg
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
