On Fri, 20 Nov 2015 11:39 pm, BartC wrote: > What's bothering me is: > > * The large amount of mumbo-jumbo used to describe what's going on
Just because you don't know the terminology doesn't make it mumbo-jumbo. That's a particularly unfair and unjustified response to make when multiple people have spent a lot of their own time, gratis, to explain what is going on. If you are willing, you can learn a lot here, one of the few places left where education is still free. > * The insistence (I think largely from Steven) that the way this feature > works is good rather than bad It is good. It's just not good for *everything*. > * The refusal to acknowledge that the def fn(a=[]) syntax is misleading. > (What value will a have when you call fn()? The true answer is that you > can't tell.) I'm not really sure that anyone has disputed that specific point. I'd say that the value of the default `a` could change, which is no different from most other uses of mutable values. This is why some people insist that mutable values are a mistake, and programming should only involve immutable, fixed, values. > * The persistent nonsense that somehow [] is mutable (what happens is > that [] is assigned to a variable, and /that/ is mutable) No, objects are mutable, or immutable, as the case may be -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
