Re: Pass by Reference
- Posted by dcuny Jan 13, 2015
- 2354 views
jimcbrown said...
Maybe we can just make the changes to the parser to allow multiple return values - so it looks the same as the other languages and the parser can check intent - but have it implemented behind-the-scenes by replacing it with the appropriate sequence creation and desequencing calls (once the parser has validated everything of course)...
My thought exactly. No run-time cost, and the parser catches stupid mistakes I make.
Plus, the syntax for assignments looks consistent.
I believe there's some sort of pack and unpack
You might have noticed I've glossed over a couple of points:
- How does this behaves with routine_id? I assume that you can't determine this ahead of time, so you simply have to implement this as it currently is, and hope for the best... Unless someone's got a better idea.
- How do you declare the number of values returned? I assume the parser keeps track of the count, and complains if they don't balance.
- There's no way to declare a return type. Then again Euphoria doesn't currently declare a return type, which is an odd omission:
function foo(integer x) returns integer -- I'd expect Euphoria would do something like this return 20 end function
The main syntactic difference is that most languages appear to use the underscore {_} character rather than {?}.
- David
