From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2010-10-03T22:06:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Pass by reference and copy on write

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 5:32 AM, Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Xavier Noria <fxn@hashref.com> wrote:
>
>> I've written a post about this topic:
>>
>> http://advogato.org/person/fxn/diary/534.html
>>
> I'm not sure about a few things in your post.

....

> So, I say that Ruby does pass by reference the Java way, and Perl does pass
> by reference the C++ way. And C can do both, and can also do pass by value.
>

I've always referred to the way languages like Smalltalk, Ruby, and
Java(when passing an object) pass arguments is "by object reference."

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/126256#564797

I don't recall where I first heard that term, but it might have been
in the literature around the Emerald, a distributed OO language
designed at the University of Washington in the mid-late 1980s.

See also

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_syntax_and_semantics#Data_structures
and
 http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/5126

for use of that term in the description of Python

  http://effbot.org/zone/call-by-object.htm for a similar comment by
someone about CLU

although the actual name coined by Barbara Liskov for what appears to
be the same thing in CLU is "call by sharing" or "call by object" or
"call by object sharing"

Of all of these 'synonyms' perhaps call "by object" might be the best.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

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