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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 ...
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. [1] The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a parameter-passing strategy [2] that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the binding strategy) [3] and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ...
If the field value is a reference to an object (e.g., a memory address) it copies the reference, hence referring to the same object as A does, and if the field value is a primitive type, it copies the value of the primitive type. In languages without primitive types (where everything is an object), all fields of the copy B are references to the ...
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 ...
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 ...
In computer programming, a reference is a value that enables a program to indirectly access a particular datum, such as a variable's value or a record, in the computer's memory or in some other storage device. The reference is said to refer to the datum, and accessing the datum is called dereferencing the reference. A reference is distinct from ...
Autoboxing is the term for getting a reference type out of a value type just through type conversion (either implicit or explicit). The compiler automatically supplies the extra source code that creates the object. For example, in versions of Java prior to J2SE 5.0, the following code did not compile:
In programming language theory, lazy evaluation, or call-by-need, [1] is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until its value is needed (non-strict evaluation) and which avoids repeated evaluations (by the use of sharing).