Is 'everything' a refrence or isn't it?

[Antoon Pardon]

Op 2006-01-15, Steven D'Aprano schreef <steve at REMOVETHIScyber.com.au>:
> On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 12:14:16 +0100, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>
>>> Do two instances of Empty have the same value, or is the question
>>> meaningless?
>> 
>> Things are a bit mixed up wrt. old-style classes (because they're
>> implemented in terms of true objects), but if you make that
>> 
>>     >>> class Empty(object):
>>     ...     __slots__ = []
>>     ...
>> 
>> it should be clear that instances of this class have no value (or if you
>> prefer, the set of values is empty for all instances), and cannot have
>> one either.
>
> But that's the thing, it isn't clear to me at all that they have no value.
> Does the empty string have a value? I would say yes. How about {} and []?
> Again, I would say yes. So why do None and Empty() have no value?
>
> It took mathematicians centuries to stop arguing about whether 0 is a
> number or not, and then they argued whether or not 1 is a number. And
> then when they settled that both 0 and 1 are numbers, they argued
> whether the empty set counted as a set or not. So I'm not surprised that
> we don't see eye-to-eye here.
>
> I think part of the reason is that you are thinking at one abstract level,
> where objects have a type, an identity, and "everything else", and you
> DEFINE that "everything else" as "value". By that definition, if there is
> nothing else, then there is no value. I can understand that, but I also
> think that there is a different sense of "value" for which it makes sense
> to include type and/or identity as part of the value. The alternative, it
> seems to me, is to conclude that empty strings, dicts, lists and tuples
> all are equally valueless, and I don't think that is a good idea.
>
> The downside of my definition of "value" is that it is fuzzy and depends
> on context. Often we want to exclude type (so that 1 and 1.0 have the
> same value),

We don't need to. We could look at == as being an "is equivallent with"
relationship. So 1 and 1.0 are not the same (value) but they are
equivallent (in an arithmetic context).

-- 
Antoon Pardon