Pass by Reference in Haskell?

Question

Coming from a C# background, I would say that the ref keyword is very useful in certain situations where changes to a method parameter are desired to directly influence the passed value for value types of for setting a parameter to null.

Also, the out keyword can come in handy when returning a multitude of various logically unconnected values.

My question is: is it possible to pass a parameter to a function by reference in Haskell? If not, what is the direct alternative (if any)?

Answer 1

There is no difference between "pass-by-value" and "pass-by-reference" in languages like Haskell and ML, because it's not possible to assign to a variable in these languages. It's not possible to have "changes to a method parameter" in the first place in influence any passed variable.