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Some people (including Guido van Rossum himself) have called this parameter-passing scheme "call by object reference". An object reference means a name, and the passed reference is an "alias", i.e. a copy of the reference to the same object, just as in C/C++. The object's value may be changed in the called function with the "alias", for example:
In that case a new object B is created, and the fields values of A are copied over to B. [3] [4] [5] This is also known as a field-by-field copy, [6] [7] [8] field-for-field copy, or field copy. [9] If the field value is a reference to an object (e.g., a memory address) it copies the reference, hence referring to the same object as A does, and ...
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
The syntax :=, called the "walrus operator", was introduced in Python 3.8. It assigns values to variables as part of a larger expression. [106] In Python, == compares by value. Python's is operator may be used to compare object identities (comparison by reference), and comparisons may be chained—for example, a <= b <= c.
In some programming languages, an assignment statement returns a value, while in others it does not. In most expression-oriented programming languages (for example, C), the assignment statement returns the assigned value, allowing such idioms as x = y = a, in which the assignment statement y = a returns the value of a, which is then assigned to x.
In computer science, having value semantics (also value-type semantics or copy-by-value semantics) means for an object that only its value counts, not its identity. [1] [2] Immutable objects have value semantics trivially, [3] and in the presence of mutation, an object with value semantics can only be uniquely-referenced at any point in a program.
In most programming languages (exceptions include Ruby), primitive types such as double, float, int, long, etc. simply store their values somewhere in the computer's memory (often the call stack). By using simple assignment, you can copy the contents of the variable to another one: Copying primitive types in Java or C++: