On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 2:17 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Well ⅓ the point of pointers may be printing them out — which even in a > language > with 1st class pointers like C is rarely done/needed
But still the useless part. You don't actually *achieve* anything by printing out the pointer. > Another ⅓ is dereferencing, pointer-arithmetic etc... the various > manifestations > of 1st-class pointers This is the part that matters. > And the third ⅓ is to provide explanations to people asking authentic > questions > [like the OP of this thread] Only questions that actually relate to one of the previous parts. > Sure you can say with Steven that this can be 'explained' by saying an object > can be in two places at one time. > Others would then say 'Humpty-dumpty!' since you have removed the most basic > intuition of objects and you are in effect saying that a python object > means what you ordain it means without further ado/explanation > > Since you believe a reference-less dictionary can be a model for such > explanations, > why not provide that? A piece of paper works just fine. However, it's hard to use that method of explanation in an email. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
