Julia

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