passing by refference

[Aahz]

In article <b9rfpa$n45$1 at ginger.mathworks.com>,
Joshua Marshall  <joshway_without_spam at myway.com> wrote:
>
>What you describe is call-by-value.  There is an implicit copy of the
>arguments passed to a function, though not a deep-copy.  The values
>that are being copied are often references.

Depends whether you consider the arguments to be the binding contained by
a target or the object being passed in by the binding; if the latter,
you're wrong.  More than that, you're completely wrong about "often
references"; what gets passed in to a function parameter is *always* a
binding.

Note that I'm using "binding" instead of "reference"; like the mistaken
use of "call-by-value", "reference" has semantics that make sense in
other languages, but not in Python.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts from
many other languages & styles:  boring syntax, unsurprising semantics,
few automatic coercions, etc etc.  But that's one of the things I like
about it."  --Tim Peters on Python, 16 Sep 93