Ref and class function calls?

[Tofu Ninja]

On Tuesday, 16 April 2013 at 15:27:10 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 04/16/2013 07:57 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> It would be bad design if a class variable decided to refer to 
> another object without the owner of that variable knowing about 
> it.


I don't know, It seems like the caller of the function should 
know what he/she is calling. I don't make practice of calling a 
function with out knowing what it will do first, the caller 
should know that their is a chance the variable would be 
reassigned if its a 'ref this function'.

The same thing can be said about normal ref arguments. The caller 
knows that if they pass a variable into a function that has a ref 
argument, then there's a chance that the variable will be 
reassigned. Its the responsibility of the caller to know what 
they are calling and what might happen because of it.

And their are plenty of cases that a 'ref this function' is 
desirable. Simple example, a linked list head with a push 
function. It reassigns the head variable to what you are pushing 
and chains the rest after it. It makes logical sense to be able 
to do head.push(...) and it makes sense for this to be a class 
function.

Tofu