Aaron Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Do you ever say to someone, "'Napoleon' will no longer refer to > Nelson. It is this lobster now instead", while you are holding a > lobster?
Not explicitly. But in the course of conversation I might refer to Napoleon, meaning Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821) or Napoleon III (1808 - 1873). There would then be an implicit 'rebinding' of the name Napoleon. > My point is that the assignment operation is rare in natural language. My point was to get away from a model for Python which was built on its likely implementation and to hint that we can build one using the naive concept of 'name for a thing' instead. IOW, 'call by value' is an unnecessary obfuscation of what *actually* happens (even though it may describe accurately the artifacts employed by an implementation) I'm glad that you thought about it! -- Arnaud -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
