On 1/16/14, Philippe Sigaud <philippe.sigaud@gmail.com> wrote:
> The thing is, an array is a reference type

Actually it's not, let's not confuse people with the terminology here. To recap for people new to arrays: an array in D is really just a struct, e.g.:

struct Array
{
    int* data;
    size_t length;
}

Array myArray;

Once you know this it's easy to understand why passing myArray by value to a function allows you to change the contents of "data", but changing what "data" points to or changing the length of the array will not be reflected at the call site, *unless* you've passed myArray to a function by reference.

On 01/20/2014 01:58 AM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:

> On 1/16/14, Philippe Sigaud <philippe.sigaud@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The thing is, an array is a reference type
>
> Actually it's not, let's not confuse people with the terminology here.
> To recap for people new to arrays: an array in D is really just a
> struct, e.g.:
>
> struct Array
> {
>      int* data;
>      size_t length;
> }
>
> Array myArray;

I don't remember whether this thread explicitly excludes fixed-length arrays but to add to common confusion(s), the above is true only for slices (aka dynamic arrays). :) (And, although it shouldn't matter, the actual implementation defines the length member before the data member.)

Ali

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/16/14, Philippe Sigaud <philippe.sigaud@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The thing is, an array is a reference type
>
> Actually it's not, let's not confuse people with the terminology here. To recap for people new to arrays: an array in D is really just a struct, e.g.:

You're right, my bad.
TL;DR: you can do

```
struct Node
{
    T data;
    Node[] children;
}
```