PleasingFungus posted:

That's not what 'pass-by-reference' means.

When a function is 'pass-by-reference', the arguments are passed as pointers ('references') to the actual values, rather than the values proper. This means that you can modify the arguments (by dereferencing the pointer), which can be good or bad. It also means that you don't have to copy the values from one space in memory to another, which is important when dealing with large variables (arrays, big objects, etc).

In C and similar languages, you can actually work with pointers, so you can make the decision explicitly. (void foo(int a, int * b) - a is passed by value, b is passed as a pointer.) Java doesn't have user-defined pointers, so the language has to make the decision for you. The decision they made for primitives (ints, bools, etc) was 'pass-by-value'. In "int a = 1; foo(a); print(a)", the result printed will always be '1', no matter what happens in foo(). This is the primary appeal of pass-by-value: you can guarantee that variables passed as function arguments remain unchanged when you return to your own scope. It's a reasonable default.

Java objects, on the other hand, are passed by reference: if you pass in an object to a function & modify it therein, you can retrieve the modified value from the calling function. That means it's possible to 'simulate' pointers in Java by using objects. E.g. "class IntPointer { int containedInt; } IntPointer a = new IntPointer(); foo(a); print(a.containedInt) - the result could be anything! This is of course clunky & overly verbose, but if you like Java, that is probably right up your alley!

The (primary) reason that Java doesn't have pointers is that pointers let you freely tinker with memory. Unlike C, Java's memory is managed - instead of the programmer having to handle memory allocation & deallocation, it's abstracted into an operation of the JVM. That means, as another consequence, that the programmer can't be allowed to tinker with memory freely, because that would break the abstraction that lets Java's memory management works.

^^ This paragraph is the actual answer you were looking for, feel free to skip the rest.

*java objects are actually pointers with a very constrained set of operations that can be performed on them.

echinopsis posted:

tef once recommended me a book on coding, I wonder what it was?

I want to read meta coding poo poo. like, not hardcore theory but explain why gotos are bad to me like I'm 5 years old

chumpchous posted:

my company has been asking me if i want to move over to development full time. it's tempting because i honestly enjoy it a lot more than my real job (editing/coloring), but then i go into cavern of cobol or stack overflow and realize how hilariously underqualified i am to do any kind of real programming work.

Moist von Lipwig posted:

i wish i had enough programming knowledge to dig really deep into like assembly it seems like the closer you get to raw silicon the closer you are to pure math/physics/enlightenment

echinopsis posted:

can't pointers to pointers to pointers be used for some fancy efficient tricky code?


also I still can't even get my head around how even the most simple quine works... I need baby's first Quine written in basic and then run a debugger at 3 lines per hour just to follow it

FamDav posted:

tef seriously you just need to find something that excites you.

quote:

are there no jobs in the uk that you would find stimulating?

Martytoof posted:

every language that isn't c-style looks weird as gently caress

i got over it for objective-c because it's mostly c-style with a bunch of brackets, but i'm having a hard time with python and stuff

and then i tried to learn ruby on rails because i wanted to make a quick website and everything about it was weird as gently caress. i am a little depressed that i can't pick this stuff up easily anymore

THC posted:

smoke weed

chumpchous posted:

i dunno when i was doing manual labor i was so tired all the time the only thing i could stress about was my job. now i have tons of surpluss energy but no surplus motivation and my job isn't that stressful so instead i stress about how generally unhappy + unhealthy + terrible my life is.

FamDav posted:

we encounter so much mediocrity in our day to day lives that it infuriates and depresses us that people who do not put in a sincere effort can be rewarded as well or even better than us. we have to accept that our reward for hard work and persistence is the knowledge that we took the more difficult path and succeeded.

only then will you find happiness and comfort.

gucci void main posted:

nothing you learn in college involving c++ is actually of use hth

also lol 12k, even in eurodollars

PleasingFungus posted:

Ericadia posted:

So what specific things in C++ do people hate? Like, name the #1 thing that makes you wish you were dead:

more like dICK posted:

so like most people who rant about c++

more like dICK posted:

I feel like its still 1998 when I see posts like that

more like dICK posted:

Some programmers I know are severely underpaid and miserable, but that doesn't make it correct to say that all programmers are

Shaggar posted:

checked exceptions ensure that developers deal with them instead of ignoring them.

JewKiller 3000 posted:

close thread, a better post than this cannot be made

PleasingFungus posted:

java question time. my understanding is that, taking advantage of the fact that java strings are immutable, identical strings are stored at the same location in memory. e.g.:

code:

String foo = "butts";
String bar = "butts"; //should be stored in the same place as foo!

googling tells me this is called "string interning", and that java's implementation is called the 'string pool'. anyway.

wouldn't that imply, then, that the == / != operators would work for comparing strings? I'd assumed that ==/!= were just comparing the values of the internal pointers (and wiki agrees with me here), so...?

dur posted:

i'm a bad programmer. this is how i'm making an xml file in python

Python code:

fcline = '\t<FeatureClass name=\"%s\" oid_field=\"ObjectID\">\n'
fline = '\t\t<Feature oid=\"%s\" action=\"added\" />\n'

outFile.write(fcline % 'MISC_PLAN_METRICS')
for row in arcpy.SearchCursor('MISC_PLAN_METRICS_Work'):
	outFile.write(fline % row.ObjectID)
outFile.write('\t</FeatureClass>\n')
	
outFile.write(fcline % 'Park_Boundaries')
for row in arcpy.SearchCursor('Park_Boundaries_Work'):
	outFile.write(fline % row.ObjectID)
outFile.write('\t</FeatureClass>\n')

outFile.write(fcline % 'Hydrology')
for row in arcpy.SearchCursor('Hydrology_Work'):
	outFile.write(fline % row.ObjectID)
outFile.write('\t</FeatureClass>\n')

it works though