Steve Summit wrote:
Perhaps they were motivated by some dim memory of the legendary old FORTRAN compilers, where (since everything was passed by reference) if you ran the program
program main x = f(5) j = 5 stop real function f(i) i = 42 returnit would set j to 42. (The program would, in effect, modify itself, you see.)
WTF? (sorry, i couldn't resist. Nice for obfuscated code, though.)