Drowning in a teacup?

[Ned Batchelder]

On Friday, April 1, 2016 at 4:27:30 PM UTC-4, Fillmore wrote:
> notorious pass by reference vs pass by value biting me in the backside 
> here. Proceeding in order.

As others have pointed out, this is false dichotomy.  There are other
possibilities than pass by reference and pass by value.  Python (and
many other languages) use something called pass by object or pass by
sharing.

This talk has details of how Python's names and values work:
http://nedbatchelder.com/text/names1.html

--Ned.