From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Oct 31 19:54:15 2003
Subject: Re: Realtime cost of call by value
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: taltman at lbl dot gov
cc: help-octave <help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 19:53:10 -0600

On 31-Oct-2003, John W. Eaton <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu> wrote:

| On 31-Oct-2003, taltman at lbl dot gov <taltman@lbl.gov> wrote:
| 
| | This would allow for both to live side-by-side, harmoniously ( I
| | believe ). ;-)
| 
| Not even close.  [...]

After rereading this message, I think it may have come across as a bit
rude, which was not my intent.

I would be interested in a way to pass arguments by reference, but it
must not be the default.  Here is a (half-baked) proposal to think
about.

Similar to C++, I think the notion of a reference argument should be a
property of the function definition, not the code that calls the
function.  So we would write something like

  function F (reference A)
    ...
  endfunction

or perhaps, if you prefer concise and cryptic

  function F (&A)
    ...
  endfunction

to declare that A is passed by reference for all calls to F rather
than something like

  function F (A)
    ...
  endfunction

  F (X)
  F (reference (X))

to say that X is passed by reference for just some calls and not
others.

Given the above definition of F, you could expect

  F (X);     # OK, pass X by reference.  If F changes A, X also changes.
  F (1);     # ERROR, reference to constant.
  F (X+1);   # ERROR, reference to temporary.
  F (X(1));  # ERROR, reference to temporary.

If you write

  Y = X;
  F (X);

and F changes A, only X changes, not Y.  Given the current
implementation of Octave, a copy will be forced at the point of the
function call, but not at the Y = X statement (that just increments an
internal reference count).

I'm not sure what syntax we should use, but a unary & as above would
be one possibility that would not be incompatible with Matlab syntax
(at least currently).

We could also introduce a way to make one variable a reference to
another apart from argument lists.  Something like

  reference A = B;

or perhaps

  &A = B;  

would cause A and B to share the same value in memory.  If A changes,
so does B, or if B changes, so does A.  If you did something like

  C = B;
  reference A = B;

then changed A, only A and B would change, not C.

Again, making this work will require some additional reference
counting trickery in Octave as currently the first assignment doesn't
actually force a copy, it just increments an internal reference count.
So in the above, we would actually force a copy at the point of the
reference declaration.  But that is just an implementation detail.
What I'm most interested in now is what the syntax and semantics
should be, not precisely how it will have to be implemented.

Comments?

jwe



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------