"pass by reference?"

[Quinn Dunkan]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 00:07:17 +0000 (UTC), Greg Weeks
<weeks at vitus.scs.agilent.com> wrote:
>Tripp Scott (tripps81 at yahoo.com) wrote:
>:   a = -1
>:   make_abs(a)
>:   print a # = 1
>
>It is good to see that I'm not the only person who still uses "pass by
>reference" to mean that a function can rebind its argument variable.

I think my preferred terminology nowadys is that python is exclusively
pass by value.  With a note that, in C, a value is an area of memory, and
in python, lisp, etc., a value is a pointer to an area of memory.