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

Go do the really big tutorial on suns website.

You seem not to understand the difference scopes variables can be. "foo" is local to your method. Nothing outside of that method can change what "foo" points too. The "foo" being referred to your method is a completely different field - its a static field on your enclosing class.

Scoping is especially important as you dont want everything to be visible to everything else in your system.