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From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Copying semantics molehill (was Re: True faiths)
Date: 27 Jan 2002 19:08:01 -0800
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Date: 2002-01-28T03:08:02+00:00
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doylep@eecg.toronto.edu (Patrick Doyle) wrote in message news:<GqCG1x.nFH@ecf.utoronto.ca>...
> I must be crazy.  I have never written a system where the > semantics of the "copy" operation mattered.  Mainly, this 
> is for two reasons:
> 
> 1. A lot of my data is immutable, so the copying semantics are moot.
> 
> 2. Instead of copying an existing object, my usual idiom is to create a
> new one from scratch.

Not crazy, but unusual. You are saying that you do not
do assignments of the form

   a := b;

where a and b are both objects and that you do not
use IN OUT parameters. It is certainly possible to write
code with these constraints, but definitely unusual.