Re: technology discussion → does the world need a "new" C ?

On 7/13/2024 4:01 AM, Tim Rentsch wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
 

On Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:12:53 +0200
Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
>

But maybe he has looked up some things, since lately he's squirming
by introducing terms like "_true_ pass-by-reference" [emphasis by me]
obviously trying to bend the semantics of the established technical
"pass-by-reference" term to fit his argument.  (Introducing new terms
for existing mechanisms or bending semantics of existing terms with
well established meaning is certainly not helpful in any way.)
>
But, yes, that person is a phenomenon.

>
I don't share your optimistic belief that the term "pass by reference"
is really established.  Very few terms in computer science (science?
really?) are established firmly.  Except, may be, in more theoretical
branches of it.

 The terms
     call by name
    call by value
    call by reference
    call by value-result
 are all well-defined and firmly established, going back more than
60 years.  I learned all of these in standard early course in
computer science sometime in the early 1970s.  Of course I can't
be sure about the source after all these years, but I expect
they were defined in the textbook we were using in the class.
 Much later, probably under the influence of people learning
by reading blogs rather than books, some of these terms were
expressed as, eg, "pass by value" or "pass by reference".
However there is no indication that the change was meant to
express a different meaning, except insofar as the person(s)
using the revised terms were confused.
 Anyone who refuses to stick to the firmly established meanings
is in all likelihood just someone who enjoys being fractious.

As I see it, they are not exactly the same:
"call by reference", is from the POV of how arguments themselves are passed to functions during a function call;
"pass by reference" has more to do with the data or object being conveyed (usually means that a pointer to the object is being passed, but generally used in cases where no explicit pointer exists).
"Call by reference" would be N/A for C, since this in not how C function calls work.
Whereas something like object instance semantics in Java, could be interpreted as an example of the latter (versus primitive arguments which are still by-value in Java).
But, as I see it, no real point in arguing this stuff (personally, I have better stuff to be doing...).
Like, having ported Quake 3 to my ISA project is shaking out so many bugs (including some amount of compiler bugs...).
Like, for example:
   char *p;
   unsigned int x;
   ...
   p-=x;
Turned out to have been broken in a rather major way (it would negate 'x', forming a zero-extended result, and add this to the pointer;
resulting pointer would then be off target by around 4GB...).
Well, and other bugs that have been seen but aren't fixed yet...