I'm wrong or Will we fix the ducks limp?

[Paul Rudin]

Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> writes:

> Antoon Pardon <antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be>:
>
>> You can do something like that in simula, but only because
>> simula has two kinds of assignments. One kind that is
>> simular to python and one that is similar to C.
>> The one that is similar that python is the reference assignment.
>
> I see Python as doing the exact same thing with variables as C.

I'm not sure that's a good mental model of what's going on. A variable
declaration in C carries semantics of memory allocation to hold the
value. This isn't so in python

>
> What is different is that in Python, every expression evaluates to a
> pointer. Thus, you can only assign pointers to variables.
>

I don't think that's really right - every expression evaluates to an
object. Whether or not that object can be accessed through some variable
or not depends on how the expression is used.