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Some people (including Guido van Rossum himself) have called this parameter-passing scheme "call by object reference". An object reference means a name, and the passed reference is an "alias", i.e. a copy of the reference to the same object, just as in C/C++. The object's value may be changed in the called function with the "alias", for example:
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
Because the C language does not specify an implicit initialization for objects of automatic storage duration, [5] care should often be taken to ensure that the address to which ptr points is valid; this is why it is sometimes suggested that a pointer be explicitly initialized to the null pointer value, which is traditionally specified in C with ...
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
In that case a new object B is created, and the fields values of A are copied over to B. [3] [4] [5] This is also known as a field-by-field copy, [6] [7] [8] field-for-field copy, or field copy. [9] If the field value is a reference to an object (e.g., a memory address) it copies the reference, hence referring to the same object as A does, and ...
In Python, == compares by value. Python's is operator may be used to compare object identities (comparison by reference), and comparisons may be chained—for example, a <= b <= c. Python uses and, or, and not as Boolean operators. Python has a type of expression named a list comprehension, and a more general expression named a generator ...
Conversely, in an eager language the above definition for ifThenElse a b c would evaluate (a), (b), and (c) regardless of the value of (a). This is not the desired behavior, as (b) or (c) may have side effects, take a long time to compute, or throw errors. It is usually possible to introduce user-defined lazy control structures in eager ...
A fundamental distinction in scope is what "part of a program" means. In languages with lexical scope (also called static scope), name resolution depends on the location in the source code and the lexical context (also called static context), which is defined by where the named variable or function is defined.