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Comment by timeon | Hacker News Reader

> While in an FP language you are passing values

By passing values do you mean 'moving'? Like not passing reference?

Yes, I guess in Rust terms, that is called moving. However, when I have some code that "moves" the value into another procedure, then the code after that call, can no longer use the moved value.

So I want to move a value, but also be able to use it after moving it, because I don't mutate it in that other function, where it got moved to. So it is actually more like copying, but without making a copy in memory.

It would be good, if Rust realized, that I don't have mutating calls anywhere and just lets me use the value. When I have a mutation going on, then of course the compiler should throw error, because that would be unsafe business.

I'm not sure how what you're describing is different from passing an immutable/shared reference.

If you call `foo(&value)` then `value` remains available in your calling scope after `foo` returns. If you don't mutate `value` in foo, and foo doesn't do anything other than derive a new value from `value`, then it sounds like a shared reference works for what you're describing?

Rust makes you be explicit as to whether you want to lend out the value or give the value away, which is a design decision, and Rust chooses that the bare syntax `value` is for moving and the `&value` syntax is for borrowing. Perhaps you're arguing that a shared immutable borrow should be the default syntax.

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding!

Couldn't you just pass a reference to your value (i.e. `&T`)? If you absolutely _need_ ownership the function you call could return back the owned value or you could use one of the mechanisms for shared ownership like `Rc<T>`. In a GC'd functional language, you're effectively getting the latter (although usually a different form of GC instead of reference counting)

I think I could. But then I would need to put & in front of every argument in every procedure definition and also deal with working with references inside the procedure, with the syntax that brings along.

Fair to be annoyed by this, but not very interesting: This is just a minor syntactical pattern that exists for a very good reason.

Syntax is generally the least interesting/important part of languages.

When you pass &variable, I don't think it affects the syntax inside the called function, does it?

Correct. If you then want to subsequently re-reference or dereference that reference (this happens sometimes), you'll need to accordingly `&` or `*` it, but if you're just using it as is, the bare syntactical `name` (whatever it happens to be) already refers to a reference.

Also, Rust does implicit dereferencing, so it's not that much of an issue in practice.

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