What is Call by Reference?

An evaluation strategy, in computer science, is a set of deterministic rules for determining evaluation of an expression in a programming language. The evaluation strategy places more emphasis on functions and operators. It defines when and in what sequence the arguments to a function are evaluated. It also defines when they are substituted into the function and the form the substitution takes place. Call by reference is one of the examples of evaluation strategies used in programming languages in the process of software application development. A programming language may combine several evaluation strategies. For example, C++ combines call by reference and call by value. Let us learn more about call by reference evaluation: A programmer in an offshore software development company may employ several languages to develop various software. Most of the languages support call by reference in one form or the other, but few use it as default. Languages like Perl and Visual Basic are one of them. Other languages like REALbasic or C++ provide special syntax for call by reference but do not use it as default. So, let’s know, what call-by-reference exactly means. In this evaluation strategy, the function, rather than receiving a copy of the argument’s value, gets an implicit reference to the argument. This means that the function has the ability to modify the value seen by its caller. Therefore, call by reference enjoys time and space efficiency as arguments do not need to be copied. Call by reference also has the potential of a good communication between a function and the caller because the information is returned by the function using its reference arguments. If you are looking to outsource software development , you should know that most software development services in India harness the power of various programming languages like Perl and Visual Basic to develop software, but some languages do not make use of call by reference. The best example is the Java language which is a strictly call by value language and it never uses call by reference