[Tutor] beginning to code

[Bill]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 8:18 AM, Bill <BILL_NOSPAM at whoknows.net> wrote:
>> Stephan Houben wrote:
>>> Op 2017-09-23, Rick Johnson schreef <rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com>:
>>>> These pissing contests over how values are passed in Python
>>>> are totally irrelevant. What does it matter? Nothing will be
>>>> gained or lost by arguing over which is true, or not. Unless
>>>> the distinction is preventing you from doing something that
>>>> you'd like to do, or unless you want to argue that one
>>>> "value passing method" would bring X, Y or Z benefits over
>>>> the other, what does it matter?
>>> Amen.
>>>
>> All one has to do, I think, is consider (1) that passing objects by "making
>> copies" of them, would be prohibitively expensive and consider that
>> something else has to happen as an alternative, and (2) understand that in
>> Python, objects don't have names, they have references (which have names).
>> The rest could be "implementation dependent" (no?)   To be amusing, how did
>> the chicken pass an egg to the_other_side_of_the_road(e)?  Could the egg get
>> crushed (stay tuned)?
> Actually they don't "have" references in any real sense of possession.
I agree (I was a bit hasty in my choice of words); but if they didn't 
"have" these references, it would be difficult, though not impossible, 
to refer to them.   Also keep in mind that the garbage collector keeps 
track, generally, of how many there are for each object!   So from the 
gc's point of view, objects (definitely) "have" references.      Next, 
what will Egg.__del__() do? : )



> An object "has" things like its type, its attributes, etc etc; if you
> have a reference to an object, you can query it for its type. But you
> can't ask an object if there's a reference to it over here or there.
> (Yes, I know that sys.getrefcount exists in CPython, but this isn't
> part of the language's definition. Also, even that is just a counter -
> you can't find specific references.) An object may have a reference to
> other objects (eg a list's contents), but it's a one-way thing -
> there's no way to find all the references to this object.
>
> So more accurate would be to say that objects don't have names, but
> names refer to objects. When you assign to a simple name, you cause
> that name to refer to the object you gave it.
>
> ChrisA