Making the move...

[Sarah Reichelt]

On 3/21/06, Rob Cozens <rcozens at pon.net> wrote:
>
> G'day Sarah,
>
> > In my experience, it's probably due to never passing values by
> > reference.
>
> I'm curious as to why you eschew passing by reference.
>
> If one needs to pass large variables, why incur the overhead of
> duplicating the value of the variable before passing it?  And if a
> variable value needed at one level is derived from a routine nested
> several calls deep, simply passing the variable by reference through
> the nested calls is the simplest way to get the value back to the
> original caller.
>

It's not a philosophy, more ignorance :-)

I haven't ever really tested it and I have an instinctive feeling that
functions should be self-sufficient and shouldn't change anything
outside them. Maybe it will suit me better in some circumstances.

Cheers,
Sarah