Can someone explain to me what the reasoning behind passing by “value” and not by “reference” in Java is?

Question

I\'m fairly new to Java (been writing other stuff for many years) and unless I\'m missing something (and I\'m happy to be wrong here) the following is a fatal flaw...

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Answer 1

This is because inside "thisDoesntWork", you are effectively destroying the local value of foo. If you want to pass by reference in this way, can always encapsulate the String inside another object, say in an array.

class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String [] fooArray = new String[1];
        fooArray[0] = new String("foo");

        System.out.println("main: " + fooArray[0]);
        thisWorks(fooArray);
        System.out.println("main: " + fooArray[0]);
    }

    public static void thisWorks(String [] foo){
        System.out.println("thisWorks: " + foo[0]);
        foo[0] = "howdy";
        System.out.println("thisWorks: " + foo[0]);
    }
}

Results in the following output:

main: foo
thisWorks: foo
thisWorks: howdy
main: howdy