* Steven D'Aprano:
On Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:26:34 +0100, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
I presume you agree that the name 'Alf P. Steinbach' refers to you. Do
you then consider it to be a 'reference' to you?
Yes, and that's irrelevant, because you can't change a name.
Pardon me, but you most certainly can. Even Germany, which doesn't allow
people to change their legal name for frivolous reasons, makes exceptions
and will allow people to change their name if (e.g.) they have a sex
change, or if they are burdened with a name that causes them ridicule,
and presumably for their equivalent of the witness relocation program.
And even Germany doesn't presume to tell people what name they are known
by to their friends and family.
In Python, one can't change names *in place*, because strings are
immutable. (Although I have seen a hack with ctypes which allows you to
modify string objects. It makes a nice trick, but is completely useless
because of the side-effects.) Even if you could modify the name, that
would break the namespace it was stored in. But of course you can change
names in two steps:
x = something()
y = x
del x
And lo, we have changed the name x to y.
Good joke. :-)
Cheers,
- Alf
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