Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 Python, if a name is intended to be "private", it is prefixed by one or two underscores. Private variables are enforced in Python only by convention. Names can also be suffixed with an underscore to prevent conflict with Python keywords. Prefixing with double underscores changes behaviour in classes with regard to name mangling.
The enclosed text becomes a string literal, which Python usually ignores (except when it is the first statement in the body of a module, class or function; see docstring). Elixir The above trick used in Python also works in Elixir, but the compiler will throw a warning if it spots this.
By contrast, a character entity reference refers to a sequence of one or more characters by the name of an entity which has the desired characters as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined (built into the markup language), or otherwise explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD) (see [a]). The format is the same ...
The assignment statement (=) binds a name as a reference to a separate, dynamically allocated object. Variables may subsequently be rebound at any time to any object. In Python, a variable name is a generic reference holder without a fixed data type; however, it always refers to some object with a type.
A function definition starts with the name of the type of value that it returns or void to indicate that it does not return a value. This is followed by the function name, formal arguments in parentheses, and body lines in braces. In C++, a function declared in a class (as non-static) is called a member function or method.
There is another kind of character reference called a character entity reference, which allows a character to be referred to by a name instead of a number. (Naming a character creates a character entity.) HTML defines some character entities, but not many; all other characters can only be included by direct encoding or using NCRs.
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 ...