On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:25:21 -0000, Jerzy Karczmarczuk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Would you please concentrate on - what I underlined - the sense of "C" > aliasing, > where you can make a pointer to point to anything, say, the 176th byte > of a > function code? Pretty much everything is referred to by reference in python. The big difference is that most primitive data types (integer, string) etc... aren't mutable - you can't change them in place - instead you replace them with a new instance containing the new/modified value. But your own object and lists are mutable - you can change their attributes. So encapsulate data within a list or as an attribute of an object and you've got the effect you're after. For example: >>> a = 5; b = a >>> a = 6 >>> a,b (6, 5) Whereas: >>> a = [5]; b = a >>> a[0] = 6 >>> a,b ([6], [6]) Note that reassigning a: >>> a = [6] causes a to point to a new list, containing the value 6, whereas the 2nd example above modified the list by replacing an element of it. Hope this helps Matt -- | Matt Hammond | R&D Engineer, BBC Research & Development, Tadworth, Surrey, UK. | http://kamaelia.sf.net/ | http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list