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Only reason I can think of is performance.

You can do that in Erlang/Elixir too, though you are passing a name/ID of the thing, not a reference to the thing itself (not in the sense of C/C++ or Rust references anyway).

There are. Yes. But the previous poster seems to imply they have NEVER seen code written like that that would be improved by making it a pure function that returns a value for the caller to assign. Never? That seems unlikely to me. Unless they've only worked with really really amazing programmers. Even then it seems unlikely.