Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Gregory Ewing Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: What other languages use the same data model as Python? Date: Thu, 05 May 2011 20:55:36 +1200 Lines: 22 Message-ID: <92f70aF9pqU1@mid.individual.net> References: <4dbd1dbf$0$29991$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <77f64071-b288-404c-8280-b2c61ba77f06@n10g2000yqf.googlegroups.com> <4dc12fb4$0$29991$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <7q1898-f3l.ln1@svn.schaathun.net> <9fd898-0el.ln1@svn.schaathun.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net BeQh7lzZ5oSVJuk8zZ1jbQHRQwUv8TvInPU3pqkjNmGg/FZ1PB Cancel-Lock: sha1:FE17XCHvddavl7TckpXC57pJQGU= User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Macintosh/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <9fd898-0el.ln1@svn.schaathun.net> Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.python:4703 Hans Georg Schaathun wrote: > With the references being > purely abstract entities and not data objects, It's not clear to me that references are any more abstract than objects, or to put it another way, that objects are any less abstract than references. After all, in normal Python usage you never actually *see* an object -- at best you see some string of characters resulting from the str() or repr() of an object. The object is a mental construct we use to make sense of the behaviour we're seeing, as are references. If you were to look inside the interpreter closely enough to see the concrete representations of objects -- the bit patterns in memory making them up -- then you would also be able to see the bit patterns making up the references. -- Greg