I get what you're saying. I'm just saying philosophically if you're going to say it is pass-by-pointer w/ castrated pointers is that any different than pass-by

I get what you're saying. I'm just saying philosophically if you're going to say it is pass-by-pointer w/ castrated pointers is that any different than pass-by-reference with castrated references? To blur the lines: If escape analysis is enabled its entirely possible for an object to allocated on the stack. In this situation a callee could manipulate the parent stack. Granted it can't overwrite the entire region wholesale, but you could functionally overwrite it all, but java doesn't have any way of doing that semantically anyway.