"Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote: > Hm. While most everything I've seen at effbot.org has been clear and to the > point, that particular article reads like a ton of obfuscation.
Must. Resist. Ad hominem. > Python passes pointers by value, just as e.g. Java does. > > There, it needed just 10 words or so. :-) 10 words _plus_ an understanding of Java. Do you really think its appropriate to discuss Python's behaviour purely in terms of other languages? Further, you've managed to define Python's behaviour as being somehow _both_ of the major evaluation strategies - calling a reference by value - so you're asking people to understand two totally irrelevant models just to avoid describing one in its own terms. Rather than arguing about whether you have a 'value' or a 'reference', it's a lot easier to explain that you're passing mutable & immutable objects around. The behaviour is thus defined in terms of the object and _not_ in the calling model, and is far more consistent with object references throughout the language. It also doesn't require reference to other languages simply to define Python's model in terms of what it isn't. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
