copy on write

[Grant Edwards]

On 2012-01-13, Devin Jeanpierre <jeanpierreda at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It seems there's a distinct difference between a+=b (in-place
>> addition/concatenation) and a=a+b (always rebinding), which is sorely
>> confusing to C programmers. But then, there's a lot about Python
>> that's sorely confusing to C programmers.
>
> I think this is confusing to just about everyone, when they first
> encounter it.

That depends on what languages they've used in the past and whether
they skip reading any documentation and just assume that all languages
work the same way.

I would agree that for the majority of new users, they previously used
only languages where an assignment operator does a "copy value", and
that 90+ percent of the time those new users they assume all languages
work that way.

I'm not sure what we can do about that -- Python's semantics are well
documented.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! If our behavior is
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