Something that is unclear to me is whether parameters to function
calls are passed by value or by reference.
It seems that everything is passed by var, but if this were the case
then some functions could potentially present proformance problems ie
if you have a list of 1000000 elements and want to search it, passing
it to find would invoke the overhead of copying 1000000 items, so you
would like to pass by imutable reference.
From: Dr. Edmund Weitz
Subject: Re: Paswsing by reference vs passing by variable.
Date:
Message-ID: <m3adtwa3kl.fsf@bird.agharta.de>
······@interaccess.com (Thaddeus L Olczyk) writes:
> Something that is unclear to me is whether parameters to function
> calls are passed by value or by reference.
> It seems that everything is passed by var, but if this were the case
> then some functions could potentially present proformance problems ie
> if you have a list of 1000000 elements and want to search it, passing
> it to find would invoke the overhead of copying 1000000 items, so you
> would like to pass by imutable reference.
<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=Pine.GSO.4.05.10105311412450.26870-100000%40mega>
<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=a3h8bd%248q4%241%40news-int.gatech.edu>
There's more to find on Google.
--
Dr. Edmund Weitz
Hamburg
Germany
The Common Lisp Cookbook
<http://cl-cookbook.sourceforge.net/>