Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> writes: > If I draw two boxes on a blackboard with an arrow between them, I > think it's perfectly reasonable to call that arrow a pointer.
Right. So the box with an arrow coming out of it is a good metaphor for pointers — *in languages that have pointers*, which Python does not. A box with an arrow coming out of it is a poor metaphor for Python's references, since a Python reference doesn't contain anything accessible to the programmer. Instead, to avoid giving the false impression that Python's references are boxes containing things, write a bare name (or other reference) on the blackboard, referring to the box that *does* contain a value accessible to the programmer. -- \ “The Vatican is not a state.… a state must have people. There | `\ are no Vaticanians.… No-one gets born in the Vatican except by | _o__) an unfortunate accident.” —Geoffrey Robertson, 2010-09-18 | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
