On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:18:11 -0500, Nitin Changlani wrote: > Thanks for the reply MRAB, Rami, Matt and Mel, > > I was assuming that since one.myList0] = one.a, the change in one.a will > ultimately trickle down to myList[0] whenever myList[0] is printed or > used in an expression. It doesn't come intuitively to me as to why that > should not happen. Can you kindly suggest what is the correct way to go > about it?
You are confusing *names* and *objects*. The presence or absence of a module qualifier is irrelevant, so for simplicity I will avoid it. I will use ` ` quotation marks to refer to names, to avoid confusing them with strings. The Python statement a = "some text" creates a name `a` which is bound to the object "some text". myList[0] = a stores the object bound to the name `a` to the first position of myList, not the name itself. So myList[0] ends up being "some text", but it has no idea whether it came from the name `a` or somewhere else. Then when you execute: a = "different text" the name `a` is bound to the object "different text". But this doesn't affect myList[0] at all, because you're not changing the object "some text" -- strings are immutable and can't be changed. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
