From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-10-03T03:27:10+09:00
Subject: Re: which language allows you to change an argument's value?

On 10/1/07, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 01:53:47 GMT, Roedy Green
> <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> declaimed the following in
> comp.lang.python:
>
>
> > Seem to me you could in FORTRAN and Pascal, and maybe even Algol.  It
> > has been a while.
> >
>         Everything in classic FORTRAN is a passed as a reference -- even
> constant arguments are passed as a reference to the memory location
> containing that constant (which is why it was possible in very early
> FORTRANs to have "a = 1 + 1" yield something other than "2" if preceded
> by, say, "call mutate(1)" where mutate looks like:
>
> subroutine mutate(arg)
> arg = arg * 2
> end

Fortran II was like this. It cost me a day or two of head-scratching
once about 35 years ago.


-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/