On Wed, 04 May 2011 14:33:34 -0500, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net> wrote: : Hans Georg Schaathun wrote: : > In C it is pass by value, as the pointer : > is explicit and do whatever you want with the pointer value. : : You clearly are not a C programmer.
I am not really a programmer period. I am many things and run into programming from many more angles than a typical programmer does. And as to C, I no longer use C when I can avoid it (which I can most but not all of the time). A few words are missing though. C is semantically pass by value. Always. But because you have pointers are data object, you can do whatever you want with them, and pass a pointer by value. Thus you can achieve the effect of transmission by reference or by name, if you want to. : Most of my C data abstractions use dual circular linked lists of : pointers to structures of pointers. *All* of that is only ever passed : (at least in my programming) as references. My code almost never passes : data by value. Not if you do not consider pointers as data, but C does, in the sense that pointers can be manipulated in the same ways as any other kind of data. : We do not consider passing a pointer as *by value* because its an : address; by definition, that is pass-by-reference. We are not passing : the *value* of the data, we are passing the memory location (the : reference) to the data. Pass by *value* on the other hand actually : places the *value* of the data item on the call stack as a parameter. That is a useful viewpoint, but it falls a bit short when you need to explain how to deal with pointers to pointers to pointers. Pointers in C are objects. But mind you, I was not the one to suggested to refer to this as pass by value. I was explaining why it makes more sense to do so for C but not for Python. You simply end up with different wordings if you try to explain how C works, and how to model data in C. We can both be right, you know; we are just addressing the issues at different levels of abstraction. : Much of this conversation has more to do with semantics. Of course. The concepts are used to explain the semantics of the languages. -- :-- Hans Georg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
