Terminology: "reference" versus "pointer"

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2015 02:54 am, Rustom Mody wrote:

> This is from the docs
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#id

Yes, what of it? What point do you think you are making?


> id(object)
> 
>     Return the "identity" of an object. This is an integer which is
>     guaranteed to be unique and constant for this object during its
>     lifetime. Two objects with non-overlapping lifetimes may have the same
>     id() value.
> 
>     CPython implementation detail: This is the address of the object in
>     memory.

What part of "CPython implementation detail" was too difficult for you to
understand?

id() is not an addressof function. It returns, and I quote:

"an integer which is guaranteed to be unique and constant for this object
during its lifetime"

which is *not the case for memory addresses*. Here are the IDs of a few
objects in Python:

steve at orac:~$ jython -c "print id(None); import sys; print id(sys)"
1
2

steve at orac:~$ ipy -c "print id(None); import sys; print id(sys)"
0
43


Are you going to argue that these are memory addresses? If not, what
relevance do you think the id() function has here?

Note: when I write my own Python implementation, all IDs will be negative
odd numbers.


-- 
Steven