passing by refference

Doug Quale quale1 at charter.net
Tue May 13 21:45:02 EDT 2003


aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:

> In article <87vfwewocj.fsf at charter.net>,
> Call-by-value is normally used when the values are explicitly passed.

I don't know what this means.  In any case, it isn't true.
Call-by-value is the terminology that is accurately applied to
argument passing in Pascal, C, Lisp, Python and many other languages.
Values are quite different in Pascal and Lisp, but they use the same
argument passing mechanism.

> In Python, the value that's being passed is implicit; you can't access
> it directly.  Period, exclamation point.  The only thing you can do with
> that value is assign it to a[nother] target or make method calls on the
> object at the other end of the binding.

What has that to do with argument passing?  You're describing the
characterstics of values in Python.  Those characteristics apply even
to values that aren't passed as function arguments.  You're not saying
anything about argument passing at all.




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