list vs tuple

[Paul Prescod]

deadmeat wrote:
> 
> > Reset your brain.
> 
> Anyone who thinks a programmer can do this is quite insane. I've been
> programming since I was 7 or 8, and did advanced mathematics throughout
> highschool. Forgetting such basic principles is not possible, esp. not with
> the given documentation which gives nothing to fill that void until later.

This thread could have gone better but let's see if we can retrieve
something useful from it.

In my experience, deadmeat is totally right that reference semantics are
one of the hardest things to learn in Python. In fact, they are one of
the hardest things to learn in any language. Whenever I learn a new
language I go directly to learn its reference/parameter semantics
because I'm not going to really understand the language until I
understand those.

That said, it is somewhat of a problem that the tutorial says so little
about it. It also starts talking about it pretty late. There should
probably be a full chapter on it. Deadmeat: you could take all of the
energy that you've used posting to this thread to write a tutorial
chapter based on the content in this thread and Fredrik's excellent
summary of the issues here:

http://w1.132.telia.com/~u13208596/guides/python-objects.htm

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