On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Now I daresay that under the hood, Pascal is passing the address of foo > (or bar) to the procedure plus, but inside plus you don't see that > address as the value of b. You see the value of foo (or bar). > > C does not do that -- you have to manually manage the pointers yourself, > while Pascal does it for you. And Python also has nothing like that.
Yep. I should have clarified that I wasn't talking about Pascal; I'm not fluent in the language (last time I did anything at all with Pascal was probably about ten years ago, and not much then). In C, it strictly does what I said: & takes the address of something, * dereferences an address. There's no way to "pass a variable" - you have to pass the address, and that has consequences if, for instance, you *return* an address and the variable ceases to exist. (Does Pascal have an equivalent of that?) And Python has no such concept, anywhere. But anything that you can achieve in C using pointers, you can probably achieve in Python using more complex objects. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list