As said, the definition of a method contains in the header a list of formal parameters. Such parameters are used in the same way as variables inside the body of the method.
The call of a method contains the parameters that have to be used as arguments for the method. Such parameters are called actual parameters, to distinguish them from the formal parameters appearing in the header of the method definition.
When we call a method and thus activate it, we have to bind the actual parameters to the formal parameters. In general, there are various ways of establishing such a binding. In Java, there is just one way: the so called call by value.
Let pa be an actual parameter in a method call, and pf the corresponding formal parameter in the header of the method definition: to bind pa to pf by value means to do the following, when the method is activated:
In other words, the formal parameter pf behaves exactly a local variable created the moment the method is called, and initialized with the value of the corresponding actual parameter pa.
At the end of the execution of the body of the method, the memory location reserved for the formal parameter is freed and the value stored in it is lost.
Note: The value of a variable that appears in the expression pa is not changed by the execution of the method. Note, however, that if such a value is a reference to an object, then the method can in fact change the object denoted by the reference (see later).
The following figure shows an example of parameter passing for the case where the parameter is a reference to an object. The case of parameters that are of a primitive data type will be described in Unit 4.
