On Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:21:40 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
> You can't reference an object without
> somewhere having either a name or a literal to start it off.
True, but not necessarily a name bound to the object you are thinking of:
some_function()
gives you an object, but it's not a literal, and "some_function" is not
the name of the object you end up with.
In a sense, you're making a fairly uninteresting claim:
"You cannot refer to an object without referring to something"
which is obviously correct. The ways to refer to something are more
interesting:
* you can refer to a thing directly by referring to it as a literal;
* you can refer to a thing bound to a name by referring to the name;
* you can refer to a thing in a namespace by referring to the namespace
in some fashion, followed by a dot, followed by the name in that
namespace, e.g. some_object.attribute, __import__('math').pi;
* you can refer to a thing in a sequence by referring to the sequence in
some fashion, followed by an index number in square brackets, e.g. seq[3];
* you can refer to a thing that is returned by a callable (function,
method, type, etc.) by referring in some fashion to that callable object,
followed by calling it, e.g. functions[9](arg) gives you a reference to
some object which may not be any of `functions`, `9`, or `arg`.
Have I missed any?
--
Steven
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