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Several things irk me about passing values as const pointers:
* They can be NULL, which is not a valid value.
* They require explicit temporary variables for storage.
* They don't compose easily in a legible manner, requiring
weird pointer passing semantics where the variable being assigned
is hidden as an argument in the innermost function call.
* We can't change the value through the pointer, requiring yet more
local variables to hold copies of the input value.
In the device interface where we pass a matrix to a function, we often
find ourselves making a local copy of the matrix so we can concatenate
other transforms to it. This copying is a lot of unnecessary busywork
that I hope to eventually avoid by laying the groundwork with this
commit.
This is a rather large API change, so I apologize for the inconvenience,
but I hope the end result and gain in legibility will be worth the pain.
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