Explanation of list reference

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 14 Feb 2014 17:55:52 -0800, Rustom Mody wrote:

> My own preference: No is operator; only id when we deliberately need to
> poke into the implementation.
> 
> Of course I am in a miniscule minority I guess on that :-)

If I have understood you, I think that's a poor way of looking at it. We 
can have an `is` operator to determine whether or not two objects are the 
same, without having a concept of object IDs; but you can't have a 
concept of object IDs without having distinct objects. `is` is more 
fundamental than id().

IDs are a proxy for distinct objects. If you live in a country with an ID 
card of some sort, then the IDs acts as an identifier for each unique 
individual. But countries without ID cards don't lack unique individual 
people.


-- 
Steven