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Just to nitpick this sentence and say nothing about the rest of your essay, Python hardly removes pointers. It just removes the ability to do pointer arithmetic, just like Javascript, go, c# and many other newer languages do. The essence of pointer, having a cheap way to refer to a load of data elsewhere, is still there. If anything Python removes the ability to refer to data in any other way. You pass a class instance by value and you can't inline a struct inside another like you can in C.
And Python even gives you a new way to subtly shoot yourself in the foot over pointers, which is the
is
operator.5 is 5
andTrue is True
but5**55 is not 5**55
(on my system). In fairness the only real use case for this is to check forthing is not None
when dealing with optional arguments, or perhaps more nichea is b
checks when you're absolutely surea
andb
come from the same finite pool of objects, as a way to optimize away a more expensive deepa == b
check.More options
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