"always passes by reference"

[Greg Ewing]

Tim Peters wrote:
> 
> Anyone thinking about references under the covers
> is just confusing their mental picture -- only the implementers have to
> worry about that, and even then rarely.

How can you have a correct mental picture of the Python
data model that doesn't contain anything corresponding
to a reference?

Whether you call it that or not, there has to be something
in the model that is not-the-object but somehow identifies-
the-object, so that the object can appear in more than one
place at a time without having multiple copies of it.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Department, 
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg