[Rd] Julia

[Nicholas Crookston]

There are many experts on this topic.  I'll keep this short.

Newer Fortran Languages allow for call by value, but call by reference
is the typical and historically, the only approach (there was a time
when you could change the value of 1 to 2!).

C "only" calls by value except that the value can be a pointer! So,
havoc is just a * away.

I'm very pleased to be on this list and read the discussion. Thank you
Douglas Bates for sending the first message.

I like R and will continue to use it. However, I also think that
strict "call by value" can get you into trouble, just trouble of a
different kind. I'm not sure we will ever yearn for "Julia ouR-Julia",
but it is sure fun to think about what might be possible with this
language. And having fun is one key objective.

Nick Crookston

2012/3/5 oliver <oliver at first.in-berlin.de>:
> On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 03:58:59PM -0800, Hervé Pagès wrote:
>> Hi Oliver,
>>
>> On 03/05/2012 09:08 AM, oliver wrote:
>> >On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 03:53:28PM +0000, William Dunlap wrote:
>> >>I haven't used Julia yet, but from my quick reading
>> >>of the docs it looks like arguments to functions are
>> >>passed by reference and not by value, so functions
>> >>can change their arguments.  My recollection from when
>> >>I first started using S (in the course of a job helping
>> >>profs and grad students do statistical programming, c. 1983)
>> >>is that not having to worry about in-place algorithms changing
>> >>your data gave S a big advantage over Fortran or C.
>> >[...]
>> >
>> >
>> >C also uses Call-by-Value.
>>
>> C *only* uses Call-by-Value.
> [...]
>
>
> Yes, that's what I meant.
>
> With "also" I meant, that it uses call-by-value, as some
> other languages also do.
>
>
> Ciao,
>   Oliver
>
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