Talk:Parameter (computer programming)

What is the difference between call-by-result and call-by-copy-restore? They seem to be defined identically. Derrick Coetzee 20:53, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

call-by-result is call-by-copy-restore with an uninitialzed variable. There are some factual errors in the "calling conventions" section of this article, which will hopefully be corrected in the migration to evaluation strategy. --bmills 21:09, 23 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup

This article is not very encyclopedic. It would be great for a programming tutorial, but not for an encyclopedia. – flamurai (t) 02:52, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)

I'm working on a cleanup and rewrite this week. I'm going to move a cleaned-up version of the "calling conventions" (which are really evaluation strategies) into a forthcoming article I've stubbed (evaluation strategy); I think the rest of the article is pretty much redundant with subroutine (which is much larger and therefore likely to be better maintained), so I'm going to recommend that the rest of the article be dropped and redirected to subroutine. --bmills 07:10, 23 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I rewrote the article somewhat. I removed the {{mergeto}} notice based on the number of individual articles that could be considered sub-articles of this, or that could be merged into this. They include function argument (I just merged it to here), default argument, and named parameter. There are also four foreign-language pages for this specific article. I also moved the overloading section to subroutine, as, IMHO, it doesn't have anything to do with specific arguments per-se, as in strongly-typed languages, it's implemented by creating a second copy of the subroutine. --Interiot 21:29, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like a positive change — the article as now phrased is surprisingly not redundant with subroutine, and the level of quality is much higher! --bmills 19:54, 12 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It might be worth pointing out that in some languages (C++ at least), in formal usage, there's a distinction between the meaning of 'argument' and 'parameter', as per [1]. --samdutton 08:30, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

These are covered somewhat at Parameter#Computer_science in case anyone wants to incorporate some of that text here. I don't quite grok the distinction myself though. Is it just like the difference between a function prototype, and instances of calling a function? Or is there more to it than that? --Interiot 18:22, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]