Hans Georg Schaathun wrote:
You cannot reference nor manipulate a
reference in python, and that IMHO makes them more abstract.
You can manipulate them just fine by moving them
from one place to another:
a = b
You can use them to get at stuff they refer to:
a = b.c
a[:] = b[:]
You can compare them:
if a is b:
...
That's about all you can do with pointers in Pascal,
and I've never heard anyone argue that Pascal pointers
are any more or less abstract than any other piece of
data in that language.
As for "referencing" a reference, you can't really do
that in Pascal either, at least not the way you can
in C, because (plain) Pascal doesn't have an address-of
operator. The only way to get a pointer to a pointer
in Pascal is to heap-allocate a single pointer, which
isn't normally a very useful thing to do.
--
Greg
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