14 May
2020
14 May
'20
8:44 a.m.
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...
-r