On Thu, 05 May 2011 14:14:22 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2011-05-05, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net> wrote: >> Grant Edwards wrote: >>> The "pass by value" and "pass by reference" parameter passing >>> mechanisms are pretty well defined, and C uses "pass by value". >> >> Yeah, that's kind-a funny, cause I'm one of the guys (old farts) that >> helped define them.... > > I give up. You don't seem to understand the C language defintion or > what is commonly meant by "pass by reference".
In fairness, he's not the only one. M Harris has twice now linked to an IBM site that describes pass-by-reference in C in terms of passing a pointer to the argument you want as the argument. Admittedly, doing so gives you almost the same behaviour, except that you have to dereference the pointers yourself. That's a pretty big difference though, and gets to the core of the argument: it's a bit like arguing that manual cars are fitted with exactly the same automatic transmission as auto cars, it's just that you have to engage the clutch and shift gears yourself. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
