Peter Anderson wrote:
Thanks everyone! Just a quick correction - "as the original poster is"
is a bit of a jump that does not reflect my original question. I DO
understand how C and other programming languages handle variables
internally (the bits of actual memory reserved, etc. etc.) and that's
why I asked the question in the first place.
If Python doesn't do it like C and the others then what mechanism does
it use - it's the sort of issue that helps me understand how the
language is interacting with the underlying operating system/hardware.
The easiest way to think of this is that Python uses mostly dictionaries
dictionaries for namespaces, and a few places it uses other techniques
if there are over-riding considerations that make the dictionaries
impractical in particular cases. Python performance would be crippled
if their dictionary implementation(s) slowed down, much as C performance
would suffer is access to RAM slowed down.
--Scott David Daniels
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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