On 2008-11-20, greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
That doesn't counter that that was intended. > 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. In their document assignment was a copying. IMO the bigger assumption is to assume that these people wanted to define "call by value" for languages which would have different assignment semantics than their own. > Rather it seems to me that the essence of the idea they > had in mind is that call-by-value is equivalent to > assignment. In their particular context. > Furthermore, I don't seem to be alone in coming to that > conclusion -- the designers of other dynamic languages > appear to be using the same logic when they describe > their parameter passing as call-by-value. So what. Some designers do and some don't and some make a particular effort to do different. -- Antoon Pardon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
