passing by refference

[Joshua Marshall]

Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
> In article <b9rfpa$n45$1 at ginger.mathworks.com>,
> Joshua Marshall  <joshway_without_spam at myway.com> wrote:
>>
>>What you describe is call-by-value.  There is an implicit copy of the
>>arguments passed to a function, though not a deep-copy.  The values
>>that are being copied are often references.

> Depends whether you consider the arguments to be the binding contained by
> a target or the object being passed in by the binding;

I'm not sure what you mean by "binding contained by a target".  A
binding is a pair: a variable and a value.

> if the latter, you're wrong.

I do mean that the arguments are objects.  If you feel I'm wrong, it's
because we disagree about terminology.  Though I've come to see that
meanings of "call-by-value" and "call-by-reference" used in c.l.py are
often non-standard.

>  More than that, you're completely wrong about "often
> references"; what gets passed in to a function parameter is *always* a
> binding.

I'm not sure in what way you mean I'm wrong here.  If you mean I
should have said "always references" instead of "often references", I
won't quibble.

> Note that I'm using "binding" instead of "reference"; like the mistaken
> use of "call-by-value", "reference" has semantics that make sense in
> other languages, but not in Python.

I believe it makes sense in Python (call-by-value), though I agree the
term "reference" might be misleading.