On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 7:45 PM Rich Morin <rdm(a)cfcl.com> wrote:
On May 13,
2020, at 17:42, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I never liked call by reference. When I was trying to understand a chunk
of code,
it was a great mental simplification to know that whatever a
called routine did, it couldn't have an effect on the code I was trying to
understand except through a returned value and (ghastly) global variables.
...
A Fortran implementation I used years ago kept constants in a "literal
pool". So, if you called a subroutine, passing in a constant, there was a
possibility that the constant might be modified upon the routine's return.
I don't recall this ever causing a problem in practice, but the possibility
was amusing...
Ah yes. A long time ago, some one came to me with a mysteriously behaving
Pr1me FORTRAN program; after much head scratching, I found where they were
changing the value of "0".
-- Charles
--
X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett