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Python scoping

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Mon Jun 20 20:55:55 EDT 2011 
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> gervaz <gervaz at gmail.com> writes:
> Python doesn't have variables the way C or many other languages have
> them.
>
> Instead, Python has objects, and references to those objects so you can
> get at them. The Python documentation, much to my frustration, calls
> these references “variables” even though that gives exactly the wrong
> implication of how they'd behave.

But variable names in C and variable names in Python follow fairly
similar rules. Yes, there's the whole thing of automatic sharing and
automatic deallocation, but the name still follows rules of scoping
that are very similar - but more flexible in C.

> With the assignment statements (the statements using ‘txt = …’), the
> name ‘txt’ is bound as a reference to a value. It's not a C-like
> variable; it doesn't have a type, it doesn't need to be declared, etc.
> It's just a name, that you can bind to exactly one value any time you
> like.

It does have a type. It's a Python object. That data type can hold any
one "thing". :)

ChrisA
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