On 2006-07-30 09:54:14, Antoon Pardon wrote: > Aren't you looking too much at implementation details now?
Possibly, but at this point I'm still trying to understand how Python does these things, and what the useful abstraction level is for me. I also still have very little experience how I'll put the things we've been discussing here into (Python) practice. While not new to programming, I'm new to Python. > 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++? Probably not. But for me it's mostly about useful terminology, not necessarily "correct" terminology. In order to talk about correct terminology, we'd have to use a common definition of "variable". This is a term so widely used that I'm not sure there is a useful single definition of it; do you know one? In any case, the following doesn't seem to be implementation detail (and rather a part of the language), but it's not really understandable with a C++ concept of "variable": >>> a=3 >>> id(a) 3368152 >>> b=a >>> id(b) 3368152 >>> b=4 >>> id(b) 3368140 You don't expect the "identity" of the variable b to change with a simple assignment from a C/C++ point of view. You also don't expect the "identity" of a and b to be the same after assigning one to the other. You can create C++ classes that behave like that (you can implement Python in C++ :), but that doesn't mean that you expect C++ language constructs to behave like that. Gerhard -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
