On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 01:53:47 GMT, Roedy Green <see_website / mindprod.com.invalid> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python: > Seem to me you could in FORTRAN and Pascal, and maybe even Algol. It > has been a while. > Everything in classic FORTRAN is a passed as a reference -- even constant arguments are passed as a reference to the memory location containing that constant (which is why it was possible in very early FORTRANs to have "a = 1 + 1" yield something other than "2" if preceded by, say, "call mutate(1)" where mutate looks like: subroutine mutate(arg) arg = arg * 2 end ) -- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG wlfraed / ix.netcom.com wulfraed / bestiaria.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/ (Bestiaria Support Staff: web-asst / bestiaria.com) HTTP://www.bestiaria.com/