non-owning references?

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> "Rhodri James" <rhodri at wildebst.demon.co.uk> (RJ) wrote:

>RJ> The point was, and remains, that this newsgroup gets regular traffic
>RJ> from people who expect Python's variables to act like C's variables,
>RJ> demonstrating that describing them as "quite compatible" is somewhat
>RJ> misleading.

So let' study these postings carefully to see what the actual confusion
is. I myself think that the confusion is not so much the variable
concept but the vale vs. reference semantics of objects. As such the
same thing plays a role in Java. Although the binding mechanisms in Java
and Python are different I don't think the actual semantics are so much
difference as to cause much confusion (with C it could be more). But
such a study could reveal that.

BTW. Which postings from (say) the last month did you have in mind?
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://pietvanoostrum.com [PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4]
Private email: piet at vanoostrum.org