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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 ...
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:
In C#, apart from the distinction between value types and reference types, there is also a separate concept called reference variables. [3] A reference variable, once declared and bound, behaves as an alias of the original variable, but it can also be rebounded to another variable by using the reference assignment operator = ref. The variable ...
Another complication with this approach is that, in languages with both reference types and unboxed value types, the garbage collector needs to somehow be able to distinguish which variables on the stack or fields in an object are regular values and which are references: in memory, an integer and a reference might look alike. The garbage ...
In computer science, having value semantics (also value-type semantics or copy-by-value semantics) means for an object that only its value counts, not its identity. [1] [2] Immutable objects have value semantics trivially, [3] and in the presence of mutation, an object with value semantics can only be uniquely-referenced at any point in a program.
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The actual values are only computed when needed. For example, one could create a function that creates an infinite list (often called a stream) of Fibonacci numbers. The calculation of the n-th Fibonacci number would be merely the extraction of that element from the infinite list, forcing the evaluation of only the first n members of the list.
Using this technique, when a user asks the system to copy an object, it instead merely creates a new reference that still points to the same object. As soon as a user attempts to modify the object through a particular reference, the system makes a real copy, applies the modification to that, and sets the reference to refer to the new copy.