Posted by blmblm@myrealbox.com on 10/05/07 12:36

In article <1PUMi.21$WQ1.20@newsfe12.lga>,
John W. Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote:
> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> > On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 01:53:47 GMT, Roedy Green
> > <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> declaimed the following in
> > comp.lang.python:
> >
> >
> >> Seem to me you could in FORTRAN and Pascal, and maybe even Algol. It
> >> has been a while.
> >>
> > Everything in classic FORTRAN is a passed as a reference -- even
> > constant arguments are passed as a reference to the memory location
> > containing that constant (which is why it was possible in very early
> > FORTRANs to have "a = 1 + 1" yield something other than "2" if preceded
> > by, say, "call mutate(1)" where mutate looks like:
> >
> > subroutine mutate(arg)
> > arg = arg * 2
> > end
> >
> > )
>
> However, some implementations passed /and returned/ elementary arguments
> by value, as Ada does.

In FORTRAN/Fortran, don't they call that "copy-in/copy-out"? Same
thing, just nitpicking a little about terminology, I hope correctly.

> (The object code was typically faster that way,
> and FORTRAN semantics were such that the difference was almost
> impossible to observe.)

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.

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