Are the values of objects the references to them?

[T.J. Crowder]

See this recent thread:
https://esdiscuss.org/topic/are-objects-values

As far as I can tell, the answer is the answer Humpty-Dumpty gave Alice:
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more
nor less." :-)

"Value" is used in the spec (AFAICT) to refer to primitive values and
objects, and "object reference" isn't mentioned anywhere in the spec.
(There's a "Reference" type, but it's used for something else.) The spec's
language in this regard is conceptual and I *believe* in keeping with comp
sci high-level theory (Allen Wirfs-Brock is extremely qualified in this
regard); but it's also specific enough for implementations to be written
unambiguously (usually).

But in other contexts, you might see the term "value" used to refer to the
actual thing that variables contain, properties contain, arguments contain,
and that are used for the return of a function. In that sense, objects are
referenced by values that identify the object (e.g., "object references").
I find this definition useful for reasoning about (and explaining) why when
you pass "an object" to a function, the object isn't copied.

But there's another view that even primitives are only referred to, not
actually contained, by variables, etc.; just that they're immutable
singletons. E.g., that `a = 2` would store a *reference* to 2 in `a`, not
the actual value 2. (And indeed, I expect that's exactly what
implementations do with primitive strings.) An implementaton could be
written that way and be fully compliant with the spec as far as I know.

Re "pass-by-value" vs. "pass-by-reference" - it has nothing to do with
object references at all. The word "reference" is used for many different
things. In that case, pass-by-reference is a term of art meaning that in,
say, `foo(bar)`, `foo` gets a reference to the **variable** `bar` that's
passed in and can change `bar`'s contents. JavaScript doesn't have that.

HTH,

-- T.J. Crowder

On Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 10:40 AM, Danny Niu <dannyniu at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all, I've been struggling finding information on this, so let me open
> by asking the following question:
>
> Q1: If primitive types are passed by value and objects by reference when
> calling function, where is this characteristic of objects mentioned in the
> standard?
>
> I've been trying to find answers from various sources, and I tried asking
> at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45388408 but no result had been
> satisfactory. People from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/518000
> seems adamant that ES is a pass-by-value language, so I assumed the value
> of objects are their individuality.
>
> So I tried reasoning a bit further, since it is defined in the standard
> that objects are a collection of properties, its value must be the
> uniqueness of such collection. And this makes sense since similar features
> in other languages also implement objects as reference types.
>
> But is it possible that the standard intentionally left this
> "implementation-defined"? So here's my second question:
>
> Q2: What's the rationale if any, to not explicitly require that objects be
> viewed as reference when passed as arguments to functions and assigned to
> variables.
>
> Thanks.
> _______________________________________________
> es-discuss mailing list
> es-discuss at mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>
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