Thanks, Hans. There may (or not) be a way to accomplish what I want in Mathematica, but it would have required me to saturate my code with “SetAttributes[*,HoldFirst”] statements—which makes source-code unwieldy—and it would have required me to rearrange all my existing function-definitions and function-calls so that large arrays were passed as the first parameter. And then later, if I wanted to pass a 2nd large array as a 2nd parameter, I would have had to make major adjustments to get it to Hold the 2nd parameter in addition to the 1st. That’s inconsistent with my goal of working efficiently, so I’m not using Mathematica for this job anymore.
I’d continually be running into undocumented surprises like this . Surprises aren’t necessary, as the language-specs for C and Common Lisp are thorough. So far Python has not surprised me or required me to run experiments in order to figure out how to use it.
And bugs that go unacknowledged by Wolfram: here . (No, I’m not going to email them about; that would be above my pay-grade.)
Mathematica will be the best tool when I’m doing high-level math, but I don’t think it’s the best tool for this low-level data-processing I’m working on currently.