Retaining Ownership

Most of the time, we'd like to access data without taking ownership over it. To accomplish this, Cairo proposes two mechanism:

• Snapshots: Instead of passing objects by value (T), objects can be passed by snapshot (@T). A snapshot is an immutable view into memory cells at a specific state that can not be mutated.
• References: Instead of passing objects by value (T), objects can be passed by reference (ref T). A reference is simply a syntactic sugar for a variable whose ownership is transferred, can be mutated, and returned back to the original owner.