From oliver at first.in-berlin.de  Mon Mar  5 18:08:35 2012
From: oliver at first.in-berlin.de (oliver)
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 18:08:35 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Julia
In-Reply-To: <E66794E69CFDE04D9A70842786030B93282DF1@PA-MBX04.na.tibco.com>
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Message-ID: <20120305170835.GA4134@siouxsie>

On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 03:53:28PM +0000, William Dunlap wrote:
> I haven't used Julia yet, but from my quick reading
> of the docs it looks like arguments to functions are
> passed by reference and not by value, so functions
> can change their arguments.  My recollection from when
> I first started using S (in the course of a job helping
> profs and grad students do statistical programming, c. 1983)
> is that not having to worry about in-place algorithms changing
> your data gave S a big advantage over Fortran or C.
[...]


C also uses Call-by-Value.
Fortran I don't know in detail.


> While this feature could slow things down and increase
> memory code, I felt that it made it easier to write correct
> code and to use functions that others had written.

Yes, I also think, that call-by-value decreases
errors in Code.

What I read about Julia it's like MATLAB plus more features for programming.
Does matlab also only use call-by-reference?


> Does Julia have a const declaration or other
> means of controlling or documenting that a given function
> will or will not change the data passed into it?

I did not explored it in detail so far.
Maybe the orig-poster already did this in more depth?


Ciao,
   Oliver



[Rd] Julia
oliver