[LC++]Return values vs reference parameters

[Mark Phillips]

Jack Lloyd wrote:

> > There is a huge price of computational inefficiencies in order to get
> > syntactically nice code.
>
> That is the whole price of abstractions, after all.

Sometimes.  As I understand it though, the C++ ideal is to
provide better programming abstractions, while still
allowing efficient code.  That is why C++ has taken
different design decisions to some other OOP languages.

> > Surely this is not the C++ way? Are there ways and means to get around
> > these problems?
>
> You may want to look at Blitz++.

Thanks for this tip.  I've just had a look at this and it
seems very interesting.  Unfortunately it seems only
to work when information is obtainable at compile
time.  Unfortunately this is not always possible.

I remember in undergraduate computer science, being
told very forcefully that "self-modifying code is bad".
I think this is false.  It can be bad, but handled correctly,
it can be very powerful.  I believe that the meta-programming
techniques used by Blitz++ could be extended to run-time
data-processing if self-modifying code was allowed.  Ie
the efficiency tuning that Blitz++ does at compile time,
could be done at runtime on a code block.  The code block
could then be run itself.

Anyway, thanks again for the info.

Cheers,

Mark.