Re: MATLAB

[Morgan McGuire <address@hidden>]

> Copy-on-mutate?  What's that?

Copy-on-mutate is a form of lazy evaluation.  It means that:

A = B

doesn't actually copy the values from B into A (A and B are values, not
pointers), instead it just remembers that A is supposed to be equal to
B.  This saves memory and time.  If we later mutate A or B, the copy
occurs.  If you're extra slick, you can put off the copy until a
significant mutation occurs (just accumulate the mutations to apply
later) or until someone actually needs the value.

When big data structures are involved, this is a very handy
optimization, expecially if parts of data structures get lazily copied.
 It also means you never use pointers for efficiency, only for
semantics.

-m


=====
Morgan McGuire  
morgan3d@yahoo.com


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