Ben wrote:
> Ah - I found out why I had cast it to a string. I had not, at that
> point, worked out ho to pass the list by value rather than reference,
> and so was casting to a string as a stopgap measure that I then forgot
> about. Now the problem is fixed after this group told me how to pass a
> list by value (by slicing the entire list)
if you write code that needs to treat a list as a distinct mutable
value, make sure *your* code makes a copy. relying on the caller to
remember to do that in all cases is way too error prone.
in other words, instead of doing
def function(seq):
# modify the sequence
...
# must pass in a copy, or things will break in mysterious ways
function(list(mylist))
do
def function(seq):
seq = list(seq) # make a distinct copy
# modify the sequence
...
function(seq)
</F>
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