[erlang-questions] pass-by-reference...

[tsuraan]

> You must have misunderstood something. (Possibly, what you were reading
> was a discussion about message passing between processes on the same
> node - in that case, binaries are handled specially, in the standard
> runtime system.)

Ok, that's probably what I was thinking of, then.  Why is message
passing handled that way?  Isn't it basically a special case of
function calling?  I understand that between processes on different
computers you would want to copy data, but why can't it be shared when
the processes are on the same machine?