And what is being manipulated isn’t your common or garden variables. What you’ve got are objects. Every data item under Python is an object with a name, an identity, a type and a value.

and Python makes it relatively easy compared to some other languages. If you want to see how objects can improve common constructs like state tables, you’ll have to read a different language.

It’s actually fairly common for Python’s own runtime to generate reference cycles for objects. One example would be an exception with a traceback object that contains references to the ...

Any mutable Python object doesn’t have a consistent hash ... to execute one of a choice of functions based on some key—a common way to emulate the switch/case functionality found in other ...

might be common, but they're often frustrating to deal with. In Python, a number of different modules and objects provide such functionality, including os.path, os.stat and glob. This isn't ...