Python newbie

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-09-19, Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Holden wrote:
>
>> No. Python implicitly dereferences all names when using them
>> to compute values, and only uses them as references on the
>> left-hand side of an assignment.
>> 
>> Please note the above statement is contentious, and will
>> likely bring a horde of screaming fanatics of various flavors
>> down on my head for terminological inexactitude.
>
> Actually, I am not a "screaming fanatic".

Steve was refering hyperbolically to people like me who find it
entertaining to argue about obscure technical points involving
useless, degenerate bits of example code.  It's one of the
things we do here instead of Perl golfing. Though off hand I
don't really see anything much wrong with the statement for
which Steve predicted an impending onslaught of language
lawyers -- unless one wanted to jump right away into the stock
discussion on name-rebinding vs. dereferencing-pointer-lvalues
that we generally save for C/C++ programmers.  I only used Perl
once about 15 years ago (that was more than enough for me), but
I would have guessed that an assigment in Perl was a
name-(re)binding more akin to Python than a store to a
variable's memory location like C/C++/Pascal/etc.

> Hopefully, this explains who am I and what is my motivation
> for delving into Python. I share your fears of screaming
> fanatics, too.

We're actually quite harmless and much friendlier than those in
most other newsgroups.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! My EARS are GONE!!
                                  at               
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