I’ve been taking a break from Functional Programming Simplified by Alvin Alexander, but coming back to it and putting down some notes.

Call by value in computer science is when you call a function with a parameter, and the function receives a pointer to that object that’s passed in. THis allows you to mutate the shared state (data at the pointer’s memory location) which can be confusing.

In Scala call-by-value means the value is either:

  • The value is a primitive like Int that is immutable
  • A pointer to an object

By-name parameters on the other hand, are evaluated only when they are referenced within the function.

If you had to write a timer function, that timed a Scala function call how would you do it?

val results = timer(someFunction)

def timer[A](blockOfCode: => A) = ???

blockOfCode: is the by-name syntax here. It’s executed seperately each time it’s called

By-name parameters were added to Scala because it makes the syntax around assertions easier.