Drowning in a teacup?

[Random832]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016, at 15:28, Ned Batchelder wrote:
> 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.

I think that this arises from a confusion as to what a "value" is in
"pass by value".

The point of it being pass by value is that there is no statement you
can execute in the function that has the effect of an assignment of the
expression that was passed in from the caller. This holds no matter what
kind of object is passed in or what mutable properties it has or does
not have.