[yonilevy]

My bad, I wasn't familiar with the term. I'm still not convinced this is a limitation though. If you want to modify an object, passing by reference usually makes perfect sense. For those occasion when this is not the case, you probably already have a smart pointer in your hand, capture it by copy. A counter example would be great.

BTW the behavior you describe has been achieved in the C language family with Apple's C block extension, not that it's relevant since it's in no way standard (aside from Objective-C++)