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mrkeen • last Friday at 1:41 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

>> I sorely miss it in Python, JS and other languages. They keep me guessing whether a function will mutate the parent structure, or a local copy in those languages!

No mention of references!

I don't care about references to foo. I don't care about facades to foo. I don't care about decorators of foo. I don't care about memory segments of foo.

"Did someone eat my lunch in the work fridge?"

"Well at least you wrote your name in permanent marker on your lunchbox, so that should help narrow it down"

Replies

kstrauser • last Friday at 4:05 PM

Then I don’t know what you mean. If you have:

  foo = open(‘bar.txt’)
  answer = frobnicate(foo)
  print(foo)
then frobnicate may call foo.close(), or it may read foo’s contents so that you’d have to seek back to the beginning before you could read them a second time. There’s literally nothing you can do in frobnicate that can make it such that the 3rd raises a NameError because foo no longer exists.