On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 7:45 PM Rich Morin wrote: > > On May 13, 2020, at 17:42, John P. Linderman wrote: > > > > I never liked call by reference. When I was trying to understand a chunk > of code, it was a great mental simplification to know that whatever a > called routine did, it couldn't have an effect on the code I was trying to > understand except through a returned value and (ghastly) global variables. > ... > > A Fortran implementation I used years ago kept constants in a "literal > pool". So, if you called a subroutine, passing in a constant, there was a > possibility that the constant might be modified upon the routine's return. > I don't recall this ever causing a problem in practice, but the possibility > was amusing... > Ah yes. A long time ago, some one came to me with a mysteriously behaving Pr1me FORTRAN program; after much head scratching, I found where they were changing the value of "0". -- Charles > > -- X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett