Keyword: borrow

Borrow can be used during the assignation of a dynamic reference. It forces the data pointer to be copied without ownership being transfered to it.

The following code is an example method that would be inside a Linked-list format called Linked. The borrow on the third line is needed as this is a dynamic reference that is owned by linkedInstance. If borrow was not used, the ownership would be transfered to reference, and linkedInstance would no longer own the data.

On the first line, findLast is returning a borrowed variant of Linked. This is an example of type annexing which can be read about here. In short, reading / setting a variable to the value that it returns will not claim ownership over that data.

.findLast method<> -> Linked:borrowed
    {
        create reference <- borrow this;
        while(reference.next != 0)
        {
            reference <- reference.next;
        }
        return reference;
    }

...

create linkedInstance <- Linked(123);