• Kagamin <spam here.lot> Nov 08 2010
• Jens Mueller <jens.k.mueller gmx.de> Nov 08 2010

Kagamin <spam here.lot> writes:

Jens Mueller Wrote:

 I find this behavior rather strange. Arrays are neither passed by value
 (copying the whole array) nor by reference. I see reasons for doing it
 like this, e.g. doing array = array[1..$] inside should not affect the
 outside.
 But I wonder whether these semantics are well enough documented?


It may take some effort to explain it. Does it help, if you think about T[] as
not an array but a slice?

Jens Mueller <jens.k.mueller gmx.de> writes:

Kagamin wrote:
 Jens Mueller Wrote:
 
 I find this behavior rather strange. Arrays are neither passed by value
 (copying the whole array) nor by reference. I see reasons for doing it
 like this, e.g. doing array = array[1..$] inside should not affect the
 outside.
 But I wonder whether these semantics are well enough documented?


 It may take some effort to explain it. Does it help, if you think about T[] as
not an array but a slice?


Yes. This behavior is well explained when one thinks about passing a
slice of data instead of an dynamic array. With a dynamic array I think
about the std::vector. But passing a reference to a std::vector is not
the same as passing a slice.

Jens