Can someone explain to me what the reasoning behind passing by “value” and not by “reference” in Java is?

Question

I\'m fairly new to Java (been writing other stuff for many years) and unless I\'m missing something (and I\'m happy to be wrong here) the following is a fatal flaw...

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Answer 1

If you think of an object as just the fields in the object then objects are passed by reference in Java because a method can modify the fields of a parameter and a caller can observe the modification. However, if you also think of an object as it's identity then objects are passed by value because a method can't change the identity of a parameter in a way that the caller can observe. So I would say Java is pass-by-value.