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Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this is differently wrong in C# (and many other modern languages). arr here is not an array at all, but is actually a reference to an array and has different semantics from the the corresponding C declaration.

This is not just being pedantic: using the same syntax for values and references does lead to confusion. At least C# has actual value types and 'ref' (but not value type arrays AFAIK), in Java this is still being worked on.

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I wouldn't agree to call it "wrong", since we're talking about languages that are trying to discourage you from doing your own memory management *(C#, that is, but I'd say this applies to any language running in a VM with gc, really). Thus, in such languages, there shouldn't be a conceptual or syntactical difference between values and references. The fact that C# allows to differentiate them from each other is a leaky abstraction imho, built in to satifsy people form a C/C++ background.

I believe that whether this is 'wrong' depends on the problem you're trying to solve. In my day to day work the difference usually doesn't matter, and I am totally happy passing around objects that others would call heavy. I am really happy that I don't have to care about references or values when doing scientific python stuff (pandas, numpy, etc), whereas I am also really happy that this stuff is important to people implementing these libraries.

Having first class references has very little to do with manual memory management. As you said, confusing values with references is a very leaky abstraction, especially when you have mutable data.

> Thus, in such languages, there shouldn't be a conceptual or syntactical difference between values and references. The fact that C# allows to differentiate them from each other is a leaky abstraction imho, built in to satifsy people form a C/C++ background.

It's not a leaky abstraction, it's a very specific design choice for performance reasons. Java also has this dichotomy between types, and for the same reason, although I believe they only delineate between primitive/non-primitive.

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