> language reference, objects: "Even the importance of object identity is affected in some sense: for immutable types, operations that compute new values may actually return a reference to any existing object with the same type and value, while for mutable objects this is not allowed. E.g., after "a = 1; b = 1", a and b may or may not refer to the same object with the value one, depending on the implementation, but after "c = []; d = []", c and d are guaranteed to refer to two different, unique, newly created empty lists.
(note the use of "may or may not" and "depending on the implementation") </F> That, I knew. What I did not know, nor get from this explanation, is that this behaviour "may" differ not only within the same implementation, but with instances of the same class or type (in this case, 'int'). Is this really a case of me being too dumb or too lazy, or could it just be that this behaviour is not all that consistent ? v. v. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list