object types, mutable or not?

[Ben Finney]

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:

> Five years ago, the President Of the United States of America, or POTUS 
> for short, referred to Barrack Obama. Today, it refers to Donald Trump. 
> This didn't happen by mutating a single person (an object) from a 
> youngish black-skinned man to an oldish orange-skinned man. It happened 
> by re-assigning the name from Obama to Trump.

This is a good analogy.

> Likewise when you re-assign a variable name from one value (an object) to 
> another, the original object doesn't change. You just make the name refer 
> to a different object, while the first goes on its merry way (probably to 
> be collected by the garbage collector and the memory reclaimed).

Hopefully I am not the only one who wondered how closely the analogy to
POTUS extends into this description.

-- 
 \      “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without |
  `\   hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd |
_o__)                                   never expect it.” —Jack Handey |
Ben Finney