You want to read a book. In your room there’s a box. You look inside the box and there is a book. You start to read the book. In this case we can think of the box as a “value type.” It directly contains the thing you’re interested in.
This time the box just has a card in it. The card tells you where to find a given book on the bookshelf. In this case the box is a “reference type.” It tells you where the thing you want can be found but it’s not something that you need on its own.
You can think of any variable as a box, i.e. a location in memory. If that location contains an actual value of interest, then in this sense it can be considered a value type. If it points to another location in memory, then it’s a reference type. In this sense, things that take more than one memory location, like strings or arrays, are generally reference types by default.
However, I think that value type semantics can be applied to any type. It would mean, for example, that something like a = b = SOMETHING would create a copy for a and changing that value would not affect b.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I’ll take a stab at this...
You want to read a book. In your room there’s a box. You look inside the box and there is a book. You start to read the book. In this case we can think of the box as a “value type.” It directly contains the thing you’re interested in.
This time the box just has a card in it. The card tells you where to find a given book on the bookshelf. In this case the box is a “reference type.” It tells you where the thing you want can be found but it’s not something that you need on its own.
You can think of any variable as a box, i.e. a location in memory. If that location contains an actual value of interest, then in this sense it can be considered a value type. If it points to another location in memory, then it’s a reference type. In this sense, things that take more than one memory location, like strings or arrays, are generally reference types by default.
However, I think that value type semantics can be applied to any type. It would mean, for example, that something like
a = b = SOMETHINGwould create a copy foraand changing that value would not affectb.