From: senderista@... (Tobin Baker)
Date: 2001-06-22T14:40:43+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:16746] Re: Simulating call-by-reference in Ruby

It occurred to me that return-by-reference (e.g. IDL out parameters)
could be simulated using the fact that parameters to a block bind to
variables of the same name in the enclosing scope.  So we could have:

//IDL

interface Foo {
    void bar(out int baz);
};

#Ruby
baz = nil
myFoo.bar {|baz|}
p baz #=> 10

where bar might be implemented like:

def bar
  yield 10
end

I can't think of a way for a method to retrieve the initial values of
parameters to a block, so I guess this would work only for out
parameters.

Is this reasonable syntax, or is it just getting too ugly?