OpenEuphoria

RE: pass by reference

• Posted by bensler at mail.com Feb 19, 2002
• 472 views

I was one of the people who suggested pass by referencing.

Here's my thoughts.
Why on EARTH do I want to type check my variables only to make my 
program crash 'elegantly', albeit better than the current alternative(no 
type checks).
With reference passing, I could type check my variable, and when it's 
out of bounds, I could modify it, or set it to a default value.
IMHO, if I'm going to sacrifice some speed to use typechecking in my 
program, it should be to safeguard my program, not just give a little 
bit more useful error info.

You COULD do it with pointers(shudder), but that is a lot of places 
where you might have to add allocations, deallocations, peeks and pokes. 
It also means you would have to do double typechecking. First using a 
generic typecast, and then a secondary typecheck within the routine.

Bernie Ryan wrote:
> 
> I keep reading that you can't use pass by reference
> in Euphoria. That is not true. You can use pass by
> reference on any variable or atom or any fixed
> length structure. The only thing you can't pass by
> reference is a sequence because it is dynamic and
> there is no way to control the errors that would
> be caused by a user. The way you pass by reference
> is to use allocates, peeks and pokes. 
> 
> Bernie
> 
>