passing by refference

[Joshua Marshall]

Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
> In article <873cjfbrxd.fsf at charter.net>,
> Doug Quale  <quale1 at charter.net> wrote:
>>
>>Argument passing in Java and C are no different from Python.  

> At the technical level, that's correct, provided you define "argument"
> correctly.  But because assignment does different things in Python, too
> many Java/C programmers get confused with Python's semantics.

> In C, you have this:

>     myStruct a, b;
>     a.x = 1;
>     b = a;
>     a.x = 2;
>     print ("%d\n", b.x);

> There's simply nowhere in Python that assignment performs a value copy
> that way.  Using "value" to describe both the references to objects and
> to the objects themselves is too confusing.  Therefore "call-by-value"
> is confusing and should be avoided when discussing Python.

I think you're just going to have to accept that there are those who
disagree with you.