"always passes by reference"

[Justin Sheehy]

weeks at golden.dtc.hp.com ((Greg Weeks)) writes:

>     def f(a):
> 	a = 42
> 
>     x = 1
>     f(x)
>     print x			# PRINTS 1

You're not demonstrating calling convention here.  You're demonstrating 
assignment semantics.

If the end result of the above example was saying anything meaningful
about calling conventions in Python, then this would be hard to explain:

>>> def g(b):
...   b[1] = 'whoops'
... 
>>> y = [1, 2, 3]
>>> g(y)
>>> y
[1, 'whoops', 3]



-Justin