Elegant copy-by-value

[Erik Max Francis]

Martin Christensen wrote:

> I wasn't thinking of simplicity implementation-wise. It just seems
> very awkward to me that it should be necessary to import a module just
> to be able to copy the value of even a primitive. For more complicated
> structures it's more understandable, but copying those by value is
> apparently easier. Go figure!

You don't.  You can create a (shallow) copy of a list with L[:], and one
of a dict with D.copy().  Numerics, strings, and tuples don't need copy
routines since they're immutable.

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