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Variables created for reference types are typed managed references. When the constructor is called, an object is created on the heap and a reference is assigned to the variable. When a variable of an object goes out of scope the reference is broken and when there are no references left the object gets marked as garbage.
The specification for pass-by-reference or pass-by-value would be made in the function declaration and/or definition. Parameters appear in procedure definitions; arguments appear in procedure calls. In the function definition f(x) = x*x the variable x is a parameter; in the function call f(2) the value 2 is the argument of the function. Loosely ...
A reference variable, once declared and bound, behaves as an alias of the original variable, but it can also be rebounded to another variable by using the reference assignment operator = ref. The variable itself can be of any type, including value types and reference types, i.e. by passing a variable of a reference type by reference (alias) to ...
Call by reference (or pass by reference) is an evaluation strategy where a parameter is bound to an implicit reference to the variable used as argument, rather than a copy of its value. This typically means that the function can modify (i.e., assign to ) the variable used as argument—something that will be seen by its caller.
Some languages assist this task by offering constructs to handle the initializedness of variables; for example, C# has a special flavour of call-by-reference parameters to subroutines (specified as out instead of the usual ref), asserting that the variable is allowed to be uninitialized on entry but will be initialized afterwards.
For a simple type like a number these conventions are relatively clear. Passing ByRef allows the procedure to modify the passed variable whereas passing ByVal does not. For an object, semantics can confuse programmers since an object is always treated as a reference. Passing an object ByVal copies the reference; not the state of the object. The ...
Type inference – C# 3 with implicitly typed local variables var and C# 9 target-typed new expressions new List comprehension – C# 3 LINQ; Tuples – .NET Framework 4.0 but it becomes popular when C# 7.0 introduced a new tuple type with language support [104] Nested functions – C# 7.0 [104] Pattern matching – C# 7.0 [104]
Nil is the empty list, and Cons a (Link a) is a cons cell of type a with another link also of type a. The definition with references, however, is type-checked and does not use potentially confusing signal values. For this reason, data structures in C are usually dealt with via wrapper functions, which are carefully checked for correctness.