binding a reference to a variable

[Erno Kuusela]

In article <yu99pu18lai2.fsf at europa.research.att.com>, Andrew Koenig
<ark at research.att.com> writes:

| One thing that fascinates me is how the nature of a language affects
| the preferred idioms therein.  To help me further my understanding,
| would you mind explaining to me why this particular idea is undesirable
| in Python?  I can think of several possible reasons, but I don't know
| which reason is most plausible to the Python community.

the way i see it, knowing that your callee can't swap another object
into a variable makes life easier as you don't have to worry about
that happening.

this is a bigger help in python than it might be in some other
languages, because python doesn't have the option of passing
function parameters by value.

  -- erno