Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Not according to my Comp Sci lecturers back in the day, and not according to my Pascal books.
Pascal books will tell you what call-by-value means in Pascal. You can't just blindly take that description and apply it to other languages, just as you can't take what your Pascal book says about assigment and apply it blindly to Python without getting into trouble. Describing call-by-value as "copying the value" works in Pascal, because "assignment" and "copy" are synonyms in that language. But they're not synonyms in all languages, so a language-independent definition of call-by-value needs to describe it in a more general way. Refusing to accept that a more general definition exists just because it's not mentioned in your Pascal book is a little absurd. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
