On 2013-04-18 15:37, ixid wrote:
I know this will not be changed, I just want to understand why it is as
it is.
My naive thought is that consistency is the best scheme and that
everything should have been passed by value or everything by reference
unless the user specifies otherwise.
I have read a comment by Andrei that they tried making fixed length
arrays into reference types but it did not work well. Did the current
situation arise through the reality of language development or is there
a reason for the inconsistency?
An array is represent using a struct with a pointer to the array data
and the length, like this:
struct Array
{
void* ptr;
size_t length;
}
The struct is passed by value, but since it contains a pointer to the
data it will be passed by reference. Note that if you do:
void foo (int[] a)
{
a ~= 3;
}
auto b = [3, 4];
foo(b);
The caller will not see the change made by "foo".
Don't know if this explanation helped you to understand.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
