I think they are "going on" about a very fundamental CS issue: mutable objects are not thread-safe. If threads are not an issue, then this has all been hot air, but it came up, IIRC, because the discussion mentioned the "mutable vs. immutable" issue, and this always leads one to concurrency nowadays, since so many applications have some level of concurrency (we take it for granted in the apps we use - and more programmers will have to face concurrency issues as time goes on; as Herb Sutter says, "The Free Lunch is Over").
Immutable objects are inherently thread-safe, and mutable ones are not. That's the simple truth, so, if one asks what's the diff, there it is. I believe that summarizes the past few days of discussion to some degree. No amount of further discussion will change the facts. The point I tried to bring up a while back was that numeric types tend to be *value types*, and they also are traditionally immutable, even without considering thread-safety issues. There is room for debate there, and I think Arthur has brought up some good points. He may have good reason for not having his complex be a value type. I was just saying that this was a departure from the norm, but hey, that what norms are for :-). Saturday, March 25, 2006, 8:21:03 AM, you wrote: MT> Arthur (addressing you directly) does your code use any threading MT> library at all? MT> Did you bring up concurrency at all? MT> If not, what do you suppose these people are going on about? MT> mt MT> _______________________________________________ MT> Edu-sig mailing list MT> Edu-sig@python.org MT> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig -- Best regards, Chuck _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
