Dan Esch wrote:
In essence, the implication of immutability for Python is that there is
only one "parrot", one "spam,"in fact one anything. (This seems like it
must hold for data primitives - does it hold for complex objects as
well? It seems it must...) In addition there is only one 1, and one 2
etc.
That's not necessarily true. If you have
a = "par" + "rot"
b = "parrot"
then, most likely (though it depends on how clever the compiler
optimizations are), there are two different string objects containing
the data "parrot". In this case, "a == b" is true because string
equality testing compares the data, but "a is b" is false because a and
b refer to different objects.
And by the way, don't let the people claiming that Python's assignment
model is bizarre confuse you. Assignment and parameter-passing in
Python is exactly the same as in any other modern OOP language; it just
so happens that in Python, all variables are references, while in most
other languages, some variables are references and others are primitive
types. But it should be obvious (though apparently isn't, to some) that
this restricted, uniform data model does not fundamentally change
anything; it just makes Python a little more restricted and uniform.
For details, see: <http://www.strout.net/info/coding/valref/>
Best,
- Joe
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