On Jan 31, 2008 2:54 PM, Michael Van Biesbrouck wrote:
> Why do people want to use copy and deepcopy?  I think that the issue is
> that Python is an imperative language that passes and copies references.
>  If a library function doesn't treat its arguments as const, horrible
> things could happen.  Compounding this, several standard operations
> (such as sort) operate in place, so if you want to use them then you
> need to make shallow copies at the very least.

I see the point for shallow copies. I just don't see the point for deep copies.

> When non-scalar types
> nest, the whole structure can be deepcopied or copy can be used
> repeatedly in a selective manner (with a high chance of bugs).

I don't understand the use case. I still think this comes primarily
from a lack of familiarity with how Python is typically used.