On 2008-09-19, Mladen Gogala <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Steve Holden wrote: > >> No. Python implicitly dereferences all names when using them >> to compute values, and only uses them as references on the >> left-hand side of an assignment. >> >> Please note the above statement is contentious, and will >> likely bring a horde of screaming fanatics of various flavors >> down on my head for terminological inexactitude. > > Actually, I am not a "screaming fanatic".
Steve was refering hyperbolically to people like me who find it entertaining to argue about obscure technical points involving useless, degenerate bits of example code. It's one of the things we do here instead of Perl golfing. Though off hand I don't really see anything much wrong with the statement for which Steve predicted an impending onslaught of language lawyers -- unless one wanted to jump right away into the stock discussion on name-rebinding vs. dereferencing-pointer-lvalues that we generally save for C/C++ programmers. I only used Perl once about 15 years ago (that was more than enough for me), but I would have guessed that an assigment in Perl was a name-(re)binding more akin to Python than a store to a variable's memory location like C/C++/Pascal/etc. > Hopefully, this explains who am I and what is my motivation > for delving into Python. I share your fears of screaming > fanatics, too. We're actually quite harmless and much friendlier than those in most other newsgroups. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! My EARS are GONE!! at visi.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list