# I am new to python. In python all numbers are immutable. This means there is one object ( a region in the memory ) created every time we do an numeric operation. I hope there should have been some good reasons why it was designed this way.
But why not have mutable numbers also in the language. A type which would behave as follows: a = MutableInt(12) b = a Now both a and b should refer to the same memory location. Any change in the object should get reflected in all the references. a.assign(13) # Same memory location should be updated with value 13, b is also 13 now. Now we can further optimize: a.incrementOne() # equivalent to a++ in C++ a.decrementOne() and the augmented assignment operation also could be made optimized. In any application most of the operation is numerical. So, i think, we should get a good speed advantage with the availability of mutable numbers. What do you think ? regards, Suresh -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list