passing by refference

[Doug Quale]

Jeremy Hylton <jeremy at zope.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2003-05-13 at 13:13, Joshua Marshall wrote:
> > Mel Wilson <mwilson at the-wire.com> wrote:
> > > In article <mailman.1052835140.9801.python-list at python.org>,
> > > Daan Hoogland <hoogland at astron.nl> wrote:
> > >>is passing by reffence possible in python?
> > 
> > >    Everything in Python is passed by reference.
> > ...
> > 
> > This is incorrect terminology.  Python has call-by-value semantics,
> > not call-by-reference (it is not possible to pass a reference to a
> > variable into a function).
> 
> If we care to debate terminology, then neither call-by-value nor
> call-by-reference apply.  Python has call-by-object semantics.  As far
> as I know, the first use of call-by-object was in a description of CLU.

Python is call-by-value.  The values are objects, but the argument
passing mechanism doesn't say anything about what values are in the
language.