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The identifier of a regular "function" in Ruby (which is really a method) cannot be used as a value or passed. It must first be retrieved into a Method or Proc object to be used as first-class data. The syntax for calling such a function object differs from calling regular methods. Nested method definitions do not actually nest the scope.
Function object: with a single method (in C++, the function operator, operator()) it acts much like a function; Immutable object: does not change state after creation; First-class object: can be used without restriction; Container object: contains other objects; Factory object: creates other objects
C appears to support assignment of array pointers, but in fact these are simply pointers to the array's first element, and again do not carry the array's size. [citation needed] In most languages, data types are not first-class objects, though in some object-oriented languages, classes are first-class objects and are instances of metaclasses.
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
Notice that the type of the result can be regarded as everything past the first supplied argument. This is a consequence of currying, which is made possible by Haskell's support for first-class functions; this function requires two inputs where one argument is supplied and the function is "curried" to produce a function for the argument not supplied.
In the C++ programming language, a reference is a simple reference datatype that is less powerful but safer than the pointer type inherited from C.The name C++ reference may cause confusion, as in computer science a reference is a general concept datatype, with pointers and C++ references being specific reference datatype implementations.
When a member function is called on an object, it invokes the member function with the same name on the object's class object, with the object automatically bound to the first argument of the function. Thus, the obligatory first parameter of instance methods serves as this; this parameter is conventionally named self, but can be named anything.
In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x) will result in an array y whose elements are sine of the corresponding elements of the array x. Vectorized index operations are also supported.