[Python-ideas] Python Isn't Perfect: adding a 'gotchas' section to the tutorial

[Masklinn]

On 2011-12-12, at 06:11 , Greg Ewing wrote:
> Richard Prosser wrote:
>> It seems to me that the essential problem is that of assignment in general, which (I believe) creates a reference on the LHS to the object on the RHS,
>> I would like to understand the reasoning behind such design decisions but I can't find any 'deep' explanations at present
>> So if you or anyone else can explain exactly why such odditties are implemented I would be grateful.
> 
> Python's assignment semantics are only an "oddity" to people
> whose prior exposure to programming languages is very limited.
> To anyone familiar with almost any other dynamic language --
> such as Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, or Javascript -- it's not
> only unsurprising
It's not even a question of "dynamic languages", Java and C#
reference types have exactly the same semantics (assignment copies
the value part of a type, which is the reference itself).

The only people I'd see confused by this are those with significant
C++ experience, where assignment of references does indeed go through
a copy of the object itself.

> As for rationale, it comes down to something like this: Copying
> large chunks of data is expensive, so it makes sense to do it
> only when you really need to. And experience shows that most of
> the time you *don't* need to copy things.
Of course technically that copy could very well be performed
"on write". This would significantly complexify the runtime as well.