A class question

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno.42.desthuilliers at wtf.websiteburo.oops.com>
writes:

>> It seems to me that in recent times more Python beginners come from
>> a Java background than from a C one.
>
> Java does have "container" variables for primitive types, and even
> for "references", Java's variables are more than names - they do
> hold type informations too. Now I don't pretend to know how this is
> really implemented, but AFAICT, and at least from a cognitive POV,
> Java's variables model looks very close to the C/C++ model.

While Java's variable declarations bear a superficial (syntactical)
similarity to C, their semantics is in fact equivalent to the
object-reference semantics we know in Python.  They implicitly refer
to objects allocated on the heap and, just like in Python, the same
object can be referenced by multiple variables.  If Java's model were
close to C/C++, that would not be possible without explicit
pointers/references since an object would be "contained" by the
variable.

Variables holding primitive types don't really influence the
variable/object relationship, since the values they hold are by nature
immutable and without identity.