On 2006-07-29, Gerhard Fiedler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2006-07-29 13:47:37, Antoon Pardon wrote: > >> I think the important thing to remember is that the assignment in Python >> is a alias maker and not a copy maker. In languages like C, Fortran, >> pascal, the assignment makes a copy from what is on the righthand and >> stores that in the variable on the lefthand. In languages like Lisp, >> Smalltalk and Python, the assignment essentially makes the lefthand >> an alias for the righthand. > > Yes, I think I got it now :) > > It seems that, in essence, Bruno is right in that Python doesn't really > have variables. Everything that seems variable doesn't really change; what > changes is that an element of what seems to change gets rebound.
Aren't you looking too much at implementation details now? The difference between an alias assignment and a storage assigment is for instance totaly irrelevant for immutable objects/values like numbers. On a language level you can't distinghuish between immutable types where the implementation uses storage assignment or alias assignment and a number of language implementation do use different implementation for different types because of optimisation considerations. AFAIU, one can also build a C++ class hierarchy that with some small limitations in used operators, would have semantics very similar to Python. Would you argue that those using such a C++ class hierarchy would no longer be using variables in C++? -- Antoon Pardon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
