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In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. [1] The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a parameter-passing strategy [2] that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the binding strategy) [3] and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ...
The specification for pass-by-reference or pass-by-value would be made in the function declaration and/or definition. Parameters appear in procedure definitions; arguments appear in procedure calls. In the function definition f(x) = x*x the variable x is a parameter; in the function call f(2) the value 2 is the argument of the function. Loosely ...
Even when function arguments are passed using "call by value" semantics (which is always the case in Java, and is the case by default in C#), a value of a reference type is intrinsically a reference; so if a parameter belongs to a reference type, the resulting behavior bears some resemblance to "call by reference" semantics.
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:
Pointers are used to pass parameters by reference. This is useful if the programmer wants a function's modifications to a parameter to be visible to the function's caller. This is also useful for returning multiple values from a function. Pointers can also be used to allocate and deallocate dynamic variables and arrays in memory. Since a ...
This function requires C++ – would not compile as C. It has the same behavior as the preceding example but passes the actual parameter by reference rather than passing its address. A call such as addTwo(v) does not include an ampersand since the compiler handles passing by reference without syntax in the call.
In Python 3.x the range() function [28] returns a generator which computes elements of the list on demand. Elements are only generated when they are needed (e.g., when print(r[3]) is evaluated in the following example), so this is an example of lazy or deferred evaluation:
A function call using named parameters differs from a regular function call in that the arguments are passed by associating each one with a parameter name, instead of providing an ordered list of arguments. For example, consider this Java or C# method call that doesn't use named parameters: