From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2010-01-19T01:24:48+09:00
Subject: Re: basic question: passing a modifiable argument to a routine

2010/1/18 lalawawa <usenet@ccjj.info>:

> Well, I'm trying to understand.  If I do
>
> a = 0
> while a < 1_000_000
>    a += 1
> end
>
> a.object_id at the end is 2000001.  Does this mean a 2 million
> instances of fixnum are in existance, just not garbage collected?

No, Fixnums are "immediate values" which means there is just the
object reference.  So there is no object allocated on the heap where
the reference points to.  We had recent discussions about this and
there is a nice article on Wikipedia that explains how this works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_pointer

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
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