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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 ...
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:
In C++, all non-reference class types have value semantics. In the above example, b is declared to be a reference (alias) of a, and for all purposes, a and b are the same thing. It is impossible to rebind b to become something else. After the above example is run, a and b are the same Foo object with prop being 3, while c is a copy of the ...
The syntax :=, called the "walrus operator", was introduced in Python 3.8. It assigns values to variables as part of a larger expression. [106] 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.
Haskell has little or no notion of reference type, but still uses the term "boxed" for the runtime system's uniform pointer-to-tagged union representation. [1] The boxed object is always a copy of the value object, and is usually immutable. Unboxing the object also returns a copy of the stored value.
In most programming languages (exceptions include Ruby), primitive types such as double, float, int, long, etc. simply store their values somewhere in the computer's memory (often the call stack). By using simple assignment, you can copy the contents of the variable to another one: Copying primitive types in Java or C++:
For example, strings and arrays are passed by reference, but when modified, they are duplicated if they have non-zero reference counts. This allows them to act as value types without the performance problems of copying on assignment or making them immutable. [8] In the Qt framework, many types are copy-on-write ("implicitly shared" in Qt's terms).
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.