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Modifying Class Object

Alf P. Steinbach alfps at start.no
Thu Feb 11 20:17:46 EST 2010 
* Steven D'Aprano:
> On Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:26:34 +0100, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
> 
>>> I presume you agree that the name 'Alf P. Steinbach' refers to you. Do
>>> you then consider it to be a 'reference' to you?
>> Yes, and that's irrelevant, because you can't change a name.
> 
> Pardon me, but you most certainly can. Even Germany, which doesn't allow 
> people to change their legal name for frivolous reasons, makes exceptions 
> and will allow people to change their name if (e.g.) they have a sex 
> change, or if they are burdened with a name that causes them ridicule, 
> and presumably for their equivalent of the witness relocation program. 
> And even Germany doesn't presume to tell people what name they are known 
> by to their friends and family.
> 
> In Python, one can't change names *in place*, because strings are 
> immutable. (Although I have seen a hack with ctypes which allows you to 
> modify string objects. It makes a nice trick, but is completely useless 
> because of the side-effects.) Even if you could modify the name, that 
> would break the namespace it was stored in. But of course you can change 
> names in two steps:
> 
> x = something()
> y = x
> del x
> 
> And lo, we have changed the name x to y.

Good joke. :-)


Cheers,

- Alf
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