ALL meanings of call-by-reference
- noun Technical meaning of call-by-reference (programming) An argument passing convention where the address of an argument variable is passed to a function or procedure, as opposed to passing the value of the argument expression. Execution of the function or procedure may have side-effects on the actual argument as seen by the caller. The C language's "&" (address of) and "*" (dereference) operators allow the programmer to code explicit call-by-reference. Other languages provide special syntax to declare reference arguments (e.g. ALGOL 60). See also call-by-name, call-by-value, call-by-value-result. 1
- noun call-by-reference (programming) An evaluation strategy in which the arguments to a function are evaluated first, and a pointer to the result is passed to the function. 0