Lawful != Mutable (was Can Python function return multiple data?)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 2:20 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok now rewrite that para above with
> s/tuple/numbers like 3 or 666/
> So I put '3' on the ram and grind it to finest powder.
> Have all trinities (of religious or secular variety) disappeared?
> 666 gone has the devil been banished from God's (or Steven's) universe?

If you write down your phone number and give it to a girl you like,
and she burns that piece of paper, do you no longer have a phone
number? No, but she certainly doesn't have your phone number any more.
There's a difference between destroying a representation and
destroying the original entity. But Steven's point wasn't about how
easy/hard it is to destroy something; it was about a tuple's
immutability NOT being a prevention of its destruction, and therefore
it's not that sense of the word in which they're immutable. Similarly,
you could destroy a document on which God's laws are written (in the
original dictionary sense; if you don't want to believe in immutable
laws of a Deity, you can substitute in a law of physics - for
instance, the law that two objects with mass exert a force of
attraction on each other due to gravity), and it wouldn't destroy the
law itself.

ChrisA