[swift-users] inout params seem to have undefined behavior

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

> Wow there are some real doozy inout code examples in there, showing
> aliasing much more fun than my snippet.  Unfortunately I can't
> understand anything else the doc is talking about.  I guess I'll just
> say a prayer and throw salt over my shoulder if using inout.

Sorry! Here's the money quote from that document:

> ##### If you didn't catch all that...
> 
> That may have been a somewhat intense description, so here's a simple summary of the rule being proposed.
> 
> If storage is passed to an inout argument, then any other simultaneous attempt to read or write to that storage, including to the storage containing it, will have unspecified behavior. Reads from it may see partially-updated values, or even values which will change as modifications are made to the original storage; and writes may be clobbered or simply disappear.
> 
> But this only applies during the call with the inout argument: the evaluation of other arguments to the call will not be interfered with, and as soon as the call ends, all these modifications will resolve back to a quiescent state.
> 
> And this unspecified behavior has limits. The storage may end up with an unexpected value, with only a subset of the writes made to it, and copies from it may unexpectedly reflect modifications made after they were copied. However, the program will otherwise remain in a consistent and uncorrupted state. This means that execution will be able to continue apace as long as these unexpected values don't trip up some higher-level invariant.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
Architechies