What is a function parameter =[] for?

[Ned Batchelder]

On Tuesday, November 24, 2015 at 1:45:34 PM UTC-5, Antoon Pardon wrote:
> Whether you want to call it literals or something else, the fact
> remains that (3, 5, 8) is treated like -42 by the CPython interpreter
> and [3, 5, 8] is not.

Maybe I've lost the original point in all this minutia about what is a
literal and what is not.  Isn't the key point here that some objects
are mutable (lists), and some are not (tuples, ints)?

--Ned.