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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Languages don't  matter.  A mathematical refutation
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2015 19:59:31 -0700
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Date: 2015-04-03T19:59:31-07:00
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Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> writes:
> I can't accept as high level any language that requires, for a
> subprogram to be able to modify a parameter, that the parameter must
> be declared as a pointer and the caller must explicitly pass a
> pointer. FORTRAN, Pascal, and Ada, to name a few, don't. C does.

That's kind of a strange criterion.  C is call-by-value so it has no way
to modify parameters, though you can modify memory that's pointed to by
a parameter.  Haskell and Erlang have purely immutable data and no
pointers, so it's impossible to modify anything: does that make them
lower level than C?