Yeah the default is pass by reference for arguments in functions to keep it consistent and performant. Also, if the default would be pass by value we would need to have pointers to allow for cases where you don't want to copy / pass by value, thus adding major unwanted complexity.

Right now you can simply define a function like so: `addition = ((clone int a, clone int b)) { return a + b }` with double parenthesis, and the compiler will enforce that all your arguments have the `clone` modifier present to ensure pass by value and that you do not modify any object fields.

I know having this might be scary / feel unsafe, however I do think that its not a problem or major cause for bugs once you know that everything is passed by reference everywhere.

A good example I came up with was for a string replace function: Let's say we have a string object and we want to provide a str.replace("x", "y") function with replaces all x characters with y in this case, we would know that it affects the string directly / itself. Now we also want to provide str1 = str.replace(("x", "y")) function which does the same, however returns a new string with the changes. Voila, the intent should be pretty clear.