> can you take the address of a variable in some way?
I intentionally didn't add this, mostly because I wanted to explore how far you can get without it (and keep the language simple). Having a "real" pointer as a first class type wouldn't work though, since it would break a lot of the assumptions I use for optimizations.
I did think about two different versions of this but didn't end up adding either:
- Something like `inout` parameters in Swift, which aren't first class pointers. This is really just an alternate syntax for returning multiple values.
- A "ref" type, which is essentially a mutable container for an arbitrary value. Passing the container around would share a reference to the same mutable value. This still wouldn't allow modifying values "outside" of the container though.
Not everything in C is pass-by-value. Sure, you can argue that a pointer itself is passed by value, but the data it points to is definitely not.
cool project. can you take the address of a variable in some way? i.e. implement your own pointers if its really really needed?
> can you take the address of a variable in some way?
I intentionally didn't add this, mostly because I wanted to explore how far you can get without it (and keep the language simple). Having a "real" pointer as a first class type wouldn't work though, since it would break a lot of the assumptions I use for optimizations.
I did think about two different versions of this but didn't end up adding either:
- Something like `inout` parameters in Swift, which aren't first class pointers. This is really just an alternate syntax for returning multiple values. - A "ref" type, which is essentially a mutable container for an arbitrary value. Passing the container around would share a reference to the same mutable value. This still wouldn't allow modifying values "outside" of the container though.
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