Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > [concerning leashed puppies]
Note: no boxes! However, there are strings attached. Now you can truly *bind* objects to variables.
If you wanted to really bind them good and proper, you'd use duct tape (or "duck tape" as some people call it -- arguably more appropriate in this context!)
Seriously, though, it is notable that the high-level programming languages pretty unanimously refuse to make variables first-class objects. I wonder why.
That's an interesting question. One reason might be that in the absence of static type analysis, assigning to a variable holding a reference to another variable would be ambiguous. For example, suppose Python had an & operator that gives you an object referring to a variable somehow. Then, after a = 42 b = 17 c = &a c = &b does 'c' now hold a reference to the variable 'b', or does it still hold a reference to 'a' and 'a' now holds a reference to 'b'? Somehow these two operations would have to be spelled different ways, which means you would need to know whether you were dealing with a variable reference or not. So they wouldn't really be first-class, in the sense of being treated on an equal footing with ordinary variables. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
