On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:22:50 +1300, greg wrote: > Antoon Pardon wrote: > >> You are changing your argument. In a follow up you made the point that >> call by value should be as it was intended by the writers of the algol >> 60 report. > > No, I was countering the argument that "call by value" is short for > "call by copying the value". I was pointing out that the inventors of > the term didn't use any such words.
Nor did they define what assignment means, and their definition of "value" seems to exclude such things as strings. > Arguing that their words were intended to imply copying, as part of the > essence of the idea, is making an even bigger assumption about their > intentions, IMO. > > Rather it seems to me that the essence of the idea they had in mind is > that call-by-value is equivalent to assignment. You've just *assumed* that assignment in Algol 60 doesn't involving copying. Based on the very little I know about Algol, I think that is a very unsafe assumption. I know significantly more about Pascal, and in Pascal, assignment *is* copying. (I wait now with bated breath for somebody to point out some Python implementation or feature where assignment doesn't make a copy...) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
