An In-Depth Understanding of Memory and Pointers in C/

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Pass by Value

Pass by Value

Learn the internals and working of pass by value.

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Introduction

Using our knowledge of stack and function call mechanism, let’s introduce the concept of pass by value.

We aim to implement a swap function that we can use throughout the program to swap the values of two variables.

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#include <stdio.h>
void swap(int a, int b)
{
    int aux = a;
    a = b;
    b = aux;
}
int main()
{
    int a = 5, b = 6;
    printf("Before swap: a = %d, b = %d\n", a, b);
    swap(a, b);
    printf("After swap: a = %d, b = %d\n", a, b);
    return 0;
}

Let’s execute the code and look at the output:

Before swap: a = 5, b = 6
After swap: a = 5, b = 6

Bummer! It didn’t work. Both a and b didn’t change, but we can see that we swapped them inside the swap function.

Investigating the code

We should use our newly acquired skill of creating ...